INCLUDING IMITATIONS, PLAGIARISMS, AND ACCIDENTAL COINCIDENCES.

Pretensions to originality are ludicrous.—Byron’s Letters.

Milton “borrowed” other poets’ thoughts, but he did not borrow as gipsies borrow children, spoiling their features that they may not be recognized. No, he returned them improved. Had he “borrowed” your coat, he would have restored it with a new nap upon it!—Leigh Hunt.

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Evidently stolen from Dr. Young:—

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But Congreve had said, not long before,—

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Copied from Blair:—

But this pretty conceit originated with Norris, of Bemerton, (died 1711,) in a religious poem:—

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Gray himself points out the imitation in Shakspeare:—

Otway also makes Priuli exclaim to his daughter,—

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Doubtless suggested to Rogers by the lines in Gray’s Elegy:—

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For this expression Gray was indebted to Virgil:—

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Gray says concerning the blindness of Milton,—

(Dr. Johnson remarks that if we suppose the blindness caused by study in the formation of his poem, this account is poetically true and happily imagined.)

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Hermias, a Galatian writer of the second century, says of Homer’s blindness,—

When Homer resolved to write of Achilles, he had an exceeding desire to fill his mind with a just idea of so glorious a hero: wherefore, having paid all due honors at his tomb, he entreats that he may obtain a sight of him. The hero grants his poet’s petition, and rises in a glorious suit of armor, which cast so insufferable a splendor that Homer lost his eyes while he gazed for the enlargement of his notions.

(Pope says if this be any thing more than mere fable, one would be apt to imagine it insinuated his contracting a blindness by too intense application while he wrote the Iliad.)

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Hume’s sarcastic fling at the clergy in a note to the first volume of his history is not original. He says,—

The ambition of the clergy can often be satisfied only by promoting ignorance, and superstition, and implicit faith, and pious frauds; and having got what Archimedes only wanted,—another world on which he could fix his engine,—no wonder they move this world at their pleasure.

In Dryden’s Don Sebastian, Dorax thus addresses the Mufti:—

Dryden says of the Earl of Shaftesbury,—

Pope adopts similar language in addressing his friend Dr. Arbuthnot:—

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Seneca said, eighteen centuries ago,—

Nullum magnum ingenium absque mistura dementiÆ est:—De Tranquil.;

and Aristotle had said it before him (Problemata).

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Sir Walter Scott says in his Woodstock,—in the scene where Alice Lee, in the presence of Charles II. under the assumed name of Louis Kerneguy, describes the character she supposes the king to have:—

Kerneguy and his supposed patron felt embarrassed, perhaps from a consciousness that the real Charles fell far short of his ideal character as designed in such glowing colors. In some cases exaggerated or inappropriate praise becomes the most severe satire.

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Probably borrowed by Pope in the following lines:—

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Drawn from Bolingbroke, who plagiarized the idea from Seneca, who says,—

O Marcellus, happier when Brutus approved thy exile than when the commonwealth approved thy consulship.

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Taken from Cowley:—

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Imitated from Crashawe’s couplet:—

Lamartine, in his Jocelyn, has the same expression:—

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This smart piece of antithesis Pope borrowed from Quinctilian, who says,—

Dr. Johnson also hurled this missile at Lord Chesterfield, calling him “A lord among wits, and a wit among lords.” The earl had offended the rugged lexicographer, whose barbarous manners in company Chesterfield holds up, in his Letters to his son, as things to be avoided.

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This has a strong affinity with a passage in Howell’s Letters:—

’Tis a powerful sex: they were too strong for the first, for the strongest, and for the wisest man that was: they must needs be strong, when one hair of a woman can draw more than a hundred pair of oxen.

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Probably from De Caux, an old French poet, who says,—

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Stolen from Lord Bacon:—

Princes are like to heavenly bodies, which cause good or evil times, and which have much veneration, but no rest.—Of Empire.

Burke, in speaking of the morals of France prior to the Revolution, says,—

Vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

This statement—the falsity of which is apparent—is disproved by a score of contradictions. Let Lord Bacon suffice:—

Another [of the Rabbins] noteth a position in moral philosophy, that men abandoned to vice do not so much corrupt manners as those that are half good and half evil.—Advancement of Learning.

Things not to be trusted:—

The collocation of dogs and harlots in both passages is very remarkable.

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Shakspeare’s dreamy Dane says,—

A sentiment very nearly expressed in Horace’s Ode to Venus:—

(As for me, neither woman, nor youth, nor the fond hope of mutual inclination, &c. delight me.)

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Palladas, a Greek poet of the third century, has the following, translated by Merivale:—

Pythagoras, who lived nearly two centuries later, also said,—

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Among the epigrams of Palladas may be found the original of a modern saw, the purport of which is that an ignoramus, by maintaining a prudent silence, may pass for a wise man:—

Shakspeare uses it in the Merchant of Venice:—

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A similar form of expression occurs in the Book of Job, x. 21, and xvi. 22; but it is probable, from this and other passages, that Shakspeare’s acquaintance with the Latin writers was greater than has been generally supposed. One of the commentators on Hamlet, in pointing out the similarity of ideas in the lines commencing, “The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,” &c. (Act I.) and the hymn of St. Ambrose in the Salisbury collection,—

has the following remark. “Some future Dr. Farmer may, perhaps, show how Shakspeare became acquainted with this passage, without being able to read the original; for the resemblance is too close to be accidental. But this, with many other passages, and especially his original Latinisms of phrase, give evidence enough of a certain degree of acquaintance with Latin,—doubtless not familiar nor scholar-like, but sufficient to give a coloring to his style, and to open to him many treasures of poetical thought and diction not accessible to the merely English reader. Such a degree of acquirement might well appear low to an accomplished Latinist like Ben Jonson, and authorize him to say of his friend,—

yet the very mention of his ‘small Latin’ indicates that Ben knew that he had some.”

Mr. Fox, the orator, remarked on one occasion that Shakspeare must have had some acquaintance with Euripides, for he could trace resemblances between passages of their dramas: e.g. what Alcestis in her last moments says about her servants is like what the dying Queen Katharine (in Henry the Eighth) says about hers, &c.

That Shakspeare “may often be tracked in the snow” of Terence, as Dryden remarks of Ben Jonson, is evident from the following:—

The last line is manifestly an alteration of the words of Parmeno in The Eunuch of Terence:—

In another play Terence says,—

Shakspeare has it,—

Apropos of this sentiment, Swift says,—

I never knew a man who could not bear the misfortunes of others with the most Christian resignation.—Thoughts on Various Subjects.

And La Rochefoucauld,—

We have all of us sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others.—Max. 20.

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Falstaff says, in 1 Henry IV. ii. 4,—

For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.

Shakspeare evidently here parodied an expression in Sir John Lyly’s Euphues:—

Though the camomile, the more it is trodden and pressed downe, the more it spreadeth; yet the violet, the oftener it is handled and touched, the sooner it withereth and decaieth.

Two verses in Titus Andronicus appear to have pleased Shakspeare so well that he twice subsequently closely copied them:—

Though Shakspeare has drawn freely from others, he is himself a mine from which many builders have quarried their materials,—a Coliseum

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This is only a new rendering of the thought thus expressed by Shakspeare:—

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The military figure of Shakspeare’s musical lines,—

is closely imitated by Chamberlain:—

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Copied from the Merchant of Venice:—

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How can we expect another to keep our secret if we cannot keep it ourselves?—La Rochefoucauld, Max. 90.

Toute rÉvÉlation d’un secret est la faute de celui qui l’a confiÉ.—La Bruyere: De la SociÉtÉ.

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It were better to be eaten to death with rust than to be scoured to nothing by perpetual motion.—Henry IV., Second Part, I. 2.

Reversed by Byron:—

The following song from Shakspeare’s Measure for Measure, commencing as follows, is copied verbatim in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Bloody Brother:—

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The following line occurs both in Pope’s Dunciad and Addison’s Campaign:—

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Ben Jonson borrowed his celebrated ballad To Celia,—

from Philostratus, a Greek poet, who flourished at the court of the Emperor Severus.

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In Milton’s description of the lazar-house occurs the following confused metaphor:—

Derived from a similar combination in Tibullus:—

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Le vice rend hommage À la vertu en s’honorant de ses apparences.—Massillon.

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It is better to desire than to enjoy, to love than to be loved.—

It makes us proud when our love of a mistress is returned: it ought to make us prouder still when we can love her for herself alone, without the aid of any such selfish reflection. This is the religion of love.—Hazlitt: Characteristics.

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People who are always taking care of their health are like misers, who are hoarding up a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.—Sterne: Koran.

Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady.—La Rochefoucauld: Max. 285.

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I weigh the man, not his title; ’tis not the king’s stamp can make the metal bettor or heavier. Your lord is a leaden shilling, which you bend every way, and debases the stamp he bears.

Titles of honor are like the impressions on coin, which add no value to gold and silver, but only render brass current.—Sterne: Koran.

Kings do with men as with pieces of money: they give them what value they please, and we are obliged to receive them at their current, and not at their real, value.—La Rochefoucauld: Max. 160.

Kossuth’s “To him that wills, nothing is impossible,”^[34] is thus expressed by La Rochefoucauld:—

Nothing is impossible: there are ways which lead to every thing; and if we had sufficient will, we should always have sufficient means.—Max. 255.

Shelley gives the idea as follows:—

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To most men, experience is like the stern-lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.—Coleridge.

We arrive complete novices at the different ages of life, and we often want experience in spite of the number of our years.—La Rochefoucauld: Max. 430.

The same idea may be found in the Adelphi of Terence, Act V. Sc. 2, v. 1–4.

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But Demosthenes, the famous Grecian orator, had said, long before,—

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Horace, in describing such a capricious kind of love, uses the following language:—

which is nearly a translation of the eleventh epigram of Callimachus.

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MoliÈre has the same sentiment:—

It may also be found in Ennius, Euripides, and other writers. The last notability who has expressed the idea is Emerson, who says,—

It adds a great deal to the force of an opinion to know that there is a man of mark and likelihood behind it.

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Campbell adopts the thoughts of these italicized words in the Mariners of England:—

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Lockhart says, in his Life of Sir Walter Scott, “It was on this occasion, I believe, that Scott first saw his friend’s brother Reginald (Heber), in after-days the Apostolic Bishop of Calcutta. He had just been declared the successful competitor for that year’s poetical prize, and read to Scott at breakfast, in Brazennose College, the MS. of his Palestine. Scott observed that in the verses on Solomon’s Temple one striking circumstance had escaped him, namely, that no tools were used in its erection. Reginald retired for a few minutes to the corner of the room, and returned with the beautiful lines,—

Cowper had previously expressed the same idea:—

Milton had also said,—

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Dryden evidently had in mind the language of Themistocles to the King of Persia:—

Speech is like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth appear in figure, whereas in thoughts they lie but in packs (i.e. rolled up, or packed up).

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Voltaire, in his Œdipus, makes Jocasta say,—

In Milton’s Samson Agonistes we find,—

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A similar thought may be found in Dante:—

(There is no greater pain than to recall a happy time in wretchedness.)

Also Chaucer:—

The same thought occurs in the writings of other Italian poets. See Marino, Adone, c. xiv.; Fortinguerra, Ricciardetto, c. xi.; and Petrarch, canzone 46. The original was probably in Boetius, de Consol. Philosoph.:—

In omni adversitate fortunÆ infeliCissimum genus est infortunii fuisse felicem et non esse.—L. ii. pr. 4.

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The famous pun in the imitation of Crabbe in the Rejected Addresses:—

and of Holmes in his Urania:—

had been anticipated by Thomas Heywood in a song:—

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Falstaff’s pun:—

Indeed I am in the waist two yards about; but I am now about no waste; I am about thrift,—(Merry Wives of Windsor.)

had also been anticipated, and may be found in Heywood’s “Epigrammes,” 1562:—

The same play on the word occurs subsequently in Shirley’s comedy of The Wedding, 1629:—

He is a great man indeed; something given to the waist, for he lives within no reasonable compass.

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Moore, in his song Dear Harp of my Country, sings,—

an idea probably caught from Horace’s Ode to Melpomene:—

(That I am pointed out by the fingers of passers-by as the stringer of the Roman lyre, is entirely thy gift: that I breathe and give pleasure, if I do give pleasure, is thine.)

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Man was made when Nature was but an apprentice, but woman when she was a skilful mistress of her art.—Cupid’s Whirligig (1607).

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Imitated by Sir John Suckling in his ballad of The Wedding:—

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Waller says, in his Lines to a Lady singing a song of his own composing,—

Moore uses the same figure:—

The original in The Myrmidons of Eschylus has been thus translated:—

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Suggested by the following passage:—

And as Praxiteles did by his glass when he saw a scurvy face in it, brake it to pieces, but for that one he saw many more as bad in a moment.

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Borrowed from La Rochefoucauld:—

Dans les premiÈres passions les femmes aiment l’amant; dans les autres elles aiment l’amour.—Max. 494.

In the same place Byron adds:—

And in some observations upon an article in Blackwood’s Magazine, he says,—

Writing grows a habit, like a woman’s gallantry. There are women who have had no intrigue, but few who have had but one only: so there are millions of men who have never written a book, but few who have written only one.

This idea is also borrowed from La Rochefoucauld:—

On peut trouver des femmes qui n’ont jamais eu de galanterie; mais il est rare d’en trouver qui n’en aient jamais eu qu’une.—Max. 73.

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Cento si richieggono ad edificare; un solo basta per distruggere tutto.—Muratori’s Annals.

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Vide also Epist. XI. 28.

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Dryden, alluding to his work, says,—

When it was only a confused mass of thoughts tumbling over one another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished, and there either to be chosen or rejected by the judgment.—Rival Ladies (1664).

Byron thus appropriates the idea:—

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Richardson had said, long before,—

Indeed, it is to this deep concern that my levity is owing; for I struggle and struggle, and try to buffet down my cruel reflections as they rise; and when I cannot, I am forced to try to make myself laugh that I may not cry; for one or other I must do: and is it not philosophy carried to the highest pitch for a man to conquer such tumults of soul as I am sometimes agitated by, and in the very height of the storm to quaver out a horse-laugh?

In the Antiquary of Sir Walter Scott, Maggie says to Oldbuck of Monkbarns (ch. xi.):—

Tom Hood, appears to have borrowed this idea in the Song of the Shirt:—

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In Rogers’ poem, Human Life is this couplet describing a good wife:—

In the Tatler, No. 49, it is said of a model couple, Amanda and Florio, that “their satisfactions are doubled, their sorrows lessened, by participation.”

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Of the buccaneering adventurer described in Rokeby, Sir Walter Scott says:—

Sir Walter Raleigh, in a letter to his wife on the eve, as he supposed, of his execution, speaks of himself as “one who, in his own respect, despiseth death in all his misshapen and ugly forms.”

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Speaking of Burke, Goldsmith says in his Retaliation:—

Pope, in his Last Letter to the Bishop of Rochester, (Atterbury,) said:—

At this time, when you are cut off from a little society and made a citizen of the world at large, you should bend your talents, not to serve a party or a few, but all mankind.

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Nous no jouissons jamais; nous espÉrons toujours.—Massillon, Sermon pour le Jour de St. Benoit.

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The jocular saying of Douglas Jerrold, that a wife of forty should, like a bank-note, be exchangeable for two of twenty, was anticipated by Byron:—

And still earlier by Gay in Equivocation. In the colloquy between a bishop and an abbot, the bishop advises:—

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Many readers will remember the lines by Burns, commencing:—

The turn of thought in this stanza bears a striking resemblance to the concluding lines of Ode cxi., of M. A. Flaminius. The following translation is close enough to point the resemblance:—

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Moore says:—

Howell in the EpistolÆ Ho-ElianÆ says:—

Alexander subdued the world—CÆsar his enemies—Hercules monsters—but he that overcomes himself is the true valiant captain.

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Brutus says, in Shakspeare’s Julius CÆsar, iv., 3:—

In Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, B. 2, occurs this passage:—

In the third place, I set down reputation, because of the peremptory tides and currents it hath, which, if they be not taken in due time, are seldom recovered, it being extreme hard to play an after game of reputation.

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King Henry says, in Shakspeare’s 2 Hen. VI., i. 1:—

George Herbert says:—

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Vitruvius says:—There are various kinds of timber, as there are various kinds of flesh; one of men, one of fishes, one of beasts, and another of birds.

St. Paul says:—All flesh is not the same flesh, &c., I Cor. xv. 39.

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In Coventry Patmore’s delicately beautiful poem, The Angel in the House, twice occurs the line,—

“An exquisite line,” says The Critic: “who could have believed that the ugly and often unjust word vanity could ever be melted down into so true and pretty and flattering a periphrasis?” Thackeray uses the same idea:—

A fair young creature, bright and blooming yesterday, distributing smiles, levying homage, inspiring desire, conscious of her power to charm, and gay with the natural enjoyments of her conquests—who, in his walk through the world, has not looked on many such a one? The Newcomes.

Magis gauderes quod habueras [amicum], quam moereres quod amiseras.

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The familiar epitaphic line,

finds a parallel in Shakspeare’s Venus and Adonis:—

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Look at the chicken by the side of yonder pond, and let it rebuke your ingratitude. It drinks, and every sip it takes it lifts its head to heaven and thanks the giver of the rain for the drink afforded to it; while thou eatest and drinkest, and there is no blessing pronounced at thy meals and no thanksgiving bestowed upon thy Father for his bounty.

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Toplady has bequeathed to us the beautiful hymn:—

But Daniel Brevint in The Christian Sacrament and Sacrifice, (1673) had made this devout and solemn aspiration:—

O Rock of Israel, Rock of Salvation, Rock struck and cleft for me, let those two streams of blood and water, which once gushed out of thy side ... bring down with them salvation and holiness into my soul.

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She (the Roman Catholic Church) may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast Solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s. Macaulay, Ranke’s History of the Popes.

The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will perhaps be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last some curious traveler from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Baalbec and Palmyra:—but am I not prophesying contrary to my consummate prudence, and casting horoscopes of empires like Rousseau?

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Readers of Don Juan sometimes descant with rapture on the beauty of the lines (c. i. v. 123),—

The epithet deep-mouthed, as applied to the bark, being especially designated as “fine.” And fine it is, but Byron found it in Shakspeare and in Goldsmith:—

The laborers of the day were all retired to rest; the lights were out in every cottage; no sounds were heard but of the shrilling cock, and the deep-mouthed watch-dog at hollow distance.

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“Your sermon,” said a great critic to a great preacher, “was very fine; but had it been only half the length, it would have produced twice the impression.” “You are quite right,” was the reply; “but the fact is, I received but sudden notice to preach, and therefore I had not the time to make my sermon short.”

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Voltaire apologized for writing a long letter on the ground that he had not time to condense. In these cases the idea is borrowed from classical literature. Pliny says in his Letters (lib. i. ep. xx.):—

Ex his apparet illum permulta dixisse; quum ederet, omisisse; ... ne dubitare possimus, quÆ per plures dies, ut necesse erat, latius dixerit, postea recisa ac purgata in unum librum, grandem quidem, unum tamen, coarctasse.

(From this it is evident that he said very much; but, when he was publishing, he omitted much: ... so that we may not doubt that what he said more diffusely, as he was at the time forced to do, having afterwards retrenched and corrected, he condensed into one single book.)

The condensation and revision required more time and thought than the first production.

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Campbell says in O’Connor’s Child,—

And again, Lines on leaving a Scene in Bavaria,—

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And Walter Scott likewise imitates himself thus:—

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In Rob Roy, Sir Walter makes Frank Osbaldistone say in his elegy on Edward the Black Prince,—

And in Marmion, toward the close of Canto Sixth, he says:—

When this inadvertent or unconscious coincidence in the poem and the novel was pointed out to Sir Walter, he replied, with his natural expression of comic gravity, “Ah! that was very careless of me. I did not think I should have committed such a blunder.”

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“I tread on the pride of Plato,” said Diogenes, as he walked over Plato’s carpet. “Yes, and with more pride,” said Plato.—Cecil, Remains.

Diogenes I hold to be the most vainglorious man of his time, and more ambitious in refusing all honors than Alexander in rejecting none.

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There is an Italian proverb used, in the extravagance of flattery, to compliment a handsome lady, expressive of this idea:—“When nature made thee, she broke the mould.” Byron uses it in the closing lines of his monody on the death of Sheridan:—

Shakspeare also says, in the second stanza of Venus and Adonis,—

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This saying, commonly ascribed to Napoleon, was borrowed by him from Tom Paine, whose works were translated into French in 1791, and who says,—

The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous, and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.

Tom Paine, in turn, adopted the idea from Hugh Blair, who says, in one place,—

It is indeed extremely difficult to hit the precise point where true wit ends and buffoonery begins.

In another,—

It frequently happens that where the second line is sublime, the third, in which he meant to rise still higher, is perfect bombast.

Finally, Blair borrowed the saying from Longinus, a celebrated Greek critic and rhetorical writer, who, in a Treatise On the Sublime, uses the same expression, with this slight modification, that he makes the transition a gradual one, while Blair, Paine, and Napoleon make it but a step.^[35]

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Evil communications corrupt good manners.—1 Cor. xv. 33.

f?e????s?? ??? ???s?’ ????a? ?a?a?.—Menander.

Bonos corrumpunt mores congressus mali.—Tertullian: Ad Uxorem.

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He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.—Eccl. i. 18.

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A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.—Bacon: On Atheism.

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In Paradise Lost, Book V. 601, we find the expression—

and in Book I. 261, this powerful passage put in the mouth of Satan:—

In Stafford’s Niobe, printed when Milton was in his cradle, (1611,) is the following:—

True it is, sir, (said the Devil,) that I, storming at the name of supremacy, sought to depose my Creator; which the watchful, all-seeing eye of Providence finding, degraded me of my angelic dignities—dispossessed me of all pleasures; and the seraphs and cherubs, the Throne, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Princedoms, Arch Angels, and all the Celestial Hierarchy, with a shout of applause, sung my departure out of Heaven. My alleluia was turned into an eheu. Now, forasmuch as I was an Angel of Light, it was the will of Wisdom to confine me to Darkness and make me Prince thereof. So that I, that could not obey in Heaven, might command in Hell; and, believe me, I had rather rule within my dark domain than to re-inhabit Coelum empyream, and there live in subjection under check, a slave of the Most High.

CÆsar said he would rather be the first man in a village than the second man in Rome.

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A fellow-feeling makes one wondrous kind.—Garrick.

I would help others out of a fellow-feeling.—Burton: Anat. of Mel.

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And learn the luxury of doing good.—Goldsmith: Traveller.

For all their luxury was doing good.—Garth: Claremont.

He tried the luxury of doing good.—Crabbe: Tales.

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Tar water is of a nature so mild and benign, and proportioned to the human constitution, as to warm without heating, to cheer but not inebriate,—Bishop Berkeley: Siris.

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None knew thee but to love thee.—Halleck: On Drake.

To know her was to love her.—Rogers: Jacqueline.

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(Let the dead be concealed in the earth, whence each one came forth into being, to return thence again—the spirit to the SPIRIT’S SOURCE, but the body to the EARTH.)

The resemblance between the above and the beautiful expression in the “Preacher’s” homily is very remarkable:—

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.—Eccles. xii. 7.

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(Things of a day! What is any one? What is he not? Men are the dream of a shadow.)

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The term brown, applied to the evening shade, is derived from the Italian, the expression “fa l’imbruno” being commonly used in Italy to denote the approach of evening.

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Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.—Shelley: Defence of Poetry.

A similar form of expression occurs in Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, x. 1.

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Stolen from a line in an obscure poem called the Sentimental Sailor:—

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In the Fragments attributed to Ossian by Baron de Harold, Fingal paints the following beautiful word-picture:—

I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they are desolate: the flames had resounded in the halls, and the voice of the people is heard no more; the stream of Cutha was removed from its place by the fall of the walls; the thistle shoots there its lowly head; the moss whistled to the winds; the fox looked out of the windows, and the rank grass of the walls waved round his head; desolate is the dwelling of Morna: silence is in the house of her fathers.

And again:—

The dreary night owl screams in the solitary retreat of his mouldering ivy-covered tower.—Larnul, the Song of Despair.

The Persian poet quoted by Gibbon also says,—

The spider hath hung with tapestry the palace of the CÆsars; the owl singeth her sentinel-song in the watch-towers of Afrasiab.—Firdousi.

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Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts as harbingers to heaven; and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness through the chinks of her sickness-broken body.—Fuller.

The great German poet was evidently familiar with Horace:—

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The resemblance of these lines to the following passage from Milton’s Second Defence of the People of England is so striking that we are inclined to regard them as a paraphrase:—

Let me then be the most feeble creature alive, so long as that feebleness serves to invigorate the energies of my rational and immortal spirit, so long as in that obscurity in which I am enveloped the light of Divine Presence more clearly shines. Then in proportion as I am weak, I shall be invincibly strong; and in proportion as I am blind, I shall more clearly see. Oh that I may thus be perfected by feebleness, and irradiated by obscurity! And indeed in my blindness I enjoy in no inconsiderable degree the favor of the Deity, who regards me with more tenderness and compassion in proportion as I am able to behold nothing but himself. Alas for him who insults me, who maligns and merits public execration! For the divine law not only shields me from injury, but almost renders me too sacred to attack,—not indeed so much from the privation of my sight, as from the overshadowing of those heavenly wings which seem to have occasioned this obscurity, and which, when occasioned, he is wont to illuminate with an interior light more precious and more pure.

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In Keble’s lines for “St. John’s Day” occurs this stanza:—

The first four lines resemble a stanza of Wither, one of the Roundhead poets (1632):—

And the last two lines recall Robert Burns, who had said in his song commencing Contented wi little, and cantie wi mair:—

Two centuries before Burns, Tasso said in his Gerusalemme Liberata (iii. 4):—

Or as Fairfax renders it:—

And before dismissing “the billows past,” it is worth while to quote the following passage from Spenser’s Faery Queene (I. 9. 40):—

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Lucretius says:—

(No longer shall thy joyous home receive thee, nor yet thy best of wives, nor shall thy sweet children run to be the first to snatch thy kisses and thrill thy breast with silent delight.)

Compare Gray’s Elegy:—

And Thomson’s Seasons (Winter):—

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The famous speech of Wolsey after his fall—

finds a counterpart in a satire of the Persian poet Ferdousi on the Arabian impostor:—

Had I but written as many verses in praise of Mahomet and Allah, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me.

It also finds a parallel in a passage from Ockley’s History of the Saracens—AN. Hegira 54, A. D. 673—

This year Moawiyah deposed Samrah, deputy over Basorah. As soon as Samrah heard this news, he said—“God curse Moawiyah. If I had served God so well as I have served him, he would never have damned me to all eternity.”

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Socrates said to some Sophists, who pretended to know everything, “As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.”

Owen Feltham, in his Resolves (Curiosity in Knowledge) remarks:—

Our knowledge doth but show us our ignorance. Our most studious scrutiny is but a discovery of what we cannot know.

Voltaire, in the Histoire d’un bon Bramin says:—

Le Bramin me dit un jour: Je voudrais n’Être jamais nÉ. Je lui demandai pourquoi. Il me rÉpondit: J’Étudie depuis quarante ans; ce sont quarante annÉes de perdues; j’enseigne les autres, et j’ignore tout.

These lines will remind the reader of the opening soliloquy of Faust in Goethe’s immortal tragedy. Bayard Taylor’s translation commences as follows:—

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In The Last Days of Pompeii (ch. v.) Glaucus, the Athenian, is made to say:—

“I am as one who is left alone at a banquet, the lights dead, and the flowers faded.”

Of course, Bulwer Lytton was familiar with Oft in the Stilly Night, which Moore had written twenty years before:—

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Dr. Johnson said that “no one does anything for the last time (knowingly) but with regret.”

In Bishop Hall’s Holy Observations (xxvij) is this passage:—

“Nothing is more absurd than that Epicurean resolution, ‘Let us eat and drink, to-morrow we die’; as if we were made only for the paunch, and lived that we might live. Yet has there never any natural man found savour in that meat which he knew should be his last; whereas they should say: Let us fast and pray, for to-morrow we shall die.”

SHAKSPEREAN RESEMBLANCES.

BOLD PLAGIARISM.

Charles Reade, in The Wandering Heir reproduces Swift’s Journal of a Modern Lady in a singular manner. Compare them. Reade says:—

“Mistress Anne Gregory held bad cards; she had to pawn ring after ring—for these ladies, being well acquainted with each other, never played on parole—and she kept bemoaning her bad luck. ‘Betty, I knew how ’twould be. The parson called to-day. This odious chair, why will you stick me in it? Stand farther, girl, I always lose when you look on.’ Mrs. Betty tossed her head, and went behind another lady. Miss Gregory still lost, and had to pawn her snuff box to Lady Dace. She consoled herself by an insinuation: ‘My Lady you touched your wedding-ring. That was a sign to your partner here.’

“’Nay Madam, ’twas but a sign my finger itched. But, if you go to that, you spoke a word began with H. Then she knew you had the king of hearts.’

“‘That is like Miss here,’ said another matron; ‘she rubs her chair when she hath matadore in hand.’

“‘Set a thief to catch a thief, Madam,’ was Miss’s ingenious and polished reply.

“‘Heyday!’ cries one, ‘Here spadillo got a mark on the back; a child might know it in the dark. Mistress Pigot, I wish you’d be pleased to pare your nails.’

“In short, they said things to each other all night, the slightest of which, among men, would have filled Phoenix Park next morning with drawn swords; but it went for little here; they were all cheats, and knew it, and knew the others knew it, and didn’t care.

“It was four o’clock before they broke up, huddled on their cloaks and hoods, and their chairs took them home with cold feet and aching heads.”

Swift says:—

HISTORICAL SIMILITUDES.

In Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic is narrated the following incident:—

A bishop’s indiscretion, however, neutralized the apostolic blows of the major (Charles the Hammer). The pagan Radbod had already immersed one of his royal legs in the baptismal font when a thought struck him. “Where are my dead forefathers at present?” he said, turning suddenly upon Bishop Wolfrau. “In hell, with all other unbelievers,” was the imprudent answer. “Mighty well,” replied Radbod, removing his leg; “then will I rather feast with my ancestors in the halls of Woden than dwell with your little starveling band of Christians in heaven.” Entreaties and threats were unavailing. The Frisian declined positively a rite which was to cause an eternal separation from his buried kindred, and he died as he had lived, a heathen.

Kingsley, in his Hypatia, in completing the history of the Goth Wulf, after his settlement in Spain, writes as follows:—

Wulf died as he had lived, a heathen. Placidia, who loved him well—as she loved all righteous and noble souls—had succeeded once in persuading him to accept baptism. Adolf himself acted as one of his sponsors; and the old warrior was in the act of stepping into the font, when he turned suddenly to the bishop and asked, “Where were the souls of his heathen ancestors?” “In hell,” replied the worthy prelate. Wulf drew back from the font, and threw his bear-skin cloak around him.... He would prefer, if Adolf had no objection, to go to his own people. And so he died unbaptized, and went to his own.

This has suggested the query whether Mr. Kingsley uses his privilege as a novelist to make a distant historical event subserve the purposes of fiction, or whether this curious incident occurred.

But Francis Parkman in his Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, notes a corresponding unwillingness on the part of the Indians to separate from their own kindred and people:—

The body cared for, he next addressed himself to the soul. “This life is short and very miserable. It matters little whether we live or die.” The patient remained silent, or grumbled his dissent. The Jesuit, after enlarging for a time in broken Huron on the brevity and nothingness of mortal weal or woe, passed next to the joys of heaven and the pains of hell, which he set forth with his best rhetoric. His pictures of infernal fires and torturing devils were readily comprehended, if the listener had consciousness enough to comprehend anything; but with respect to the advantages of the French paradise he was slow of conviction. “I wish to go where my relations and ancestors have gone,” was a common reply. “Heaven is a good place for Frenchmen,” said another; “but I wish to be among Indians, for the French will give me nothing to eat when I get there.” Often the patient was stolidly silent; sometimes he was hopelessly perverse and contradictory. Again nature triumphed over grace. “Which will you choose,” demanded the priest of a dying woman, “heaven or hell?” “Hell, if my children are there, as you say,” returned the mother. “Do they hunt in heaven, or make war, or go to feasts?” asked an anxious inquirer. “Oh, no!” replied the father. “Then,” returned the querist, “I will not go. It is not good to be lazy.” But above all other obstacles was the dread of starvation in the regions of the blest. Nor when the dying Indian had been induced at last to express a desire for Paradise was it an easy matter to bring him to a due contrition for his sins; for he would deny with indignation that he had ever committed any. When at length, as sometimes happened, all these difficulties gave way, and the patient had been brought to what seemed to his instructor a fitting frame for baptism, the priest, with contentment at his heart, brought water in a cup or in the hollow of his hand, touched his forehead with the mystic drop, and snatched him from an eternity of woe. But the convert, even after his baptism, did not always manifest a satisfactory spiritual condition. “Why did you baptize that Iroquois?” asked one of the dying neophytes, speaking of the prisoner recently tortured; “he will get to heaven before us, and, when he sees us coming, he will drive us out.”

HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF.

Herodotus tells us (Book III. 118) that after the conspirator Intaphernes and his family had been imprisoned and held for execution by order of Darius, the wife of the condemned man constantly presented herself before the royal palace exhibiting every demonstration of grief. As she regularly continued this conduct, her frequent appearance at length excited the compassion of Darius, who thus addressed her by a messenger: “Woman, King Darius offers you the liberty of any individual of your family whom you may most desire to preserve.” After some deliberation with herself she made this reply: “If the king will grant me the life of any one of my family, I choose my brother in preference to the rest.” Her determination greatly astonished the king; he sent to her therefore a second message to this effect: “The king desires to know why you have thought proper to pass over your children and your husband, and to preserve your brother, who is certainly a more remote connection than your children, and cannot be so dear to you as your husband.” She answered: “O king! if it please the deity, I may have another husband; and if I be deprived of these I may have other children; but as my parents are both dead, it is certain that I can have no other brother.” The answer appeared to Darius very judicious; indeed he was so well pleased with it that he not only gave the woman the life of her brother, but also pardoned her eldest son.

A passage in the Antigone of Sophocles embodies the same singular sentiment. Creon forbade the rites of sepulture to Polynices, after the duel with his brother Eteocles, in which they were mutually slain, and decreed immediate death to any one who should dare to bury him. Antigone, their sister, was detected in the act of burial, and was condemned to be buried alive for her pious care. In her dangerous situation she goes on to say:—

A story of analogous character told by an oriental to Miss Rogers, is related in her book Domestic Life in Palestine, as follows:—

When Ibrahim Pasha, the son of Mahomet Ali, ruled in Palestine, he sent men into all the towns and villages to gather together a large army. Then a certain woman of Serfurich sought Ibrahim Pasha at Akka, and came into his presence bowing herself before him, and said: “O my lord, look with pity on thy servant, and hear my prayer. A little while ago there were three men in my house, my husband, my brother, and my eldest son. But now behold, they have been carried away to serve in your army, and I am left with my little ones without a protector. I pray you grant liberty to one of these men, that he may remain at home.” And Ibrahim had pity on her and said: “O woman, do you ask for your husband, for your son, or for your brother?” And she said: “Oh, my lord, give me my brother.” And he answered: “How is this, O woman, do you prefer a brother to a husband or a son?” The woman, who was renowned for her wit and readiness of speech, replied in a blank verse impromptu:—

And Ibrahim was much pleased with the words of the woman, and said: “O, woman, happy above many is thy brother; he shall be free for thy word’s sake, and thy husband and thy son shall be free also.” Then the woman could not speak for joy and gladness. And Ibrahim said: “Go in peace; let it not be known that I have spoken with you this day.” Then she rose, and went her way to her village, trusting in the promise of the Pasha. After three days, her husband, and son, and brother returned unto her, saying: “We are free from service by order of the Pasha, but this matter is a mystery to us.” And all the neighbors marvelled greatly. But the woman held her peace, and this story did not become known until Ibrahim’s departure from Akka, after the overthrow of the Egyptian goverment in Syria, in 1840.

What the husband and the son thought of wifely and motherly affection when the mystery of their deliverance was cleared up, is not reported.

THE TWO STATESMEN.

Hume says (History of England):—

A little before he (Wolsey) expired (28th November, 1530) he addressed himself in the following words to Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower, who had him in custody: “I pray you have me heartily recommended unto his royal majesty (Henry VIII.), and beseech him on my behalf to call to his remembrance all matters that have passed between us especially with regard to his business with the queen, and then will he know in his conscience whether I have offended him. He is a prince of a most royal carriage, and hath a princely heart; and rather than he will miss or want any part of his will, he will endanger the one half of his kingdom. I do assure you that I have often kneeled before him, sometimes three hours together, to persuade him from his will and appetite, but could not prevail: had I but served God as diligently as I have served the king, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs. But this is the just reward I must receive for my indulgent pains and study, not regarding my service to God but only to my prince.”

Holinshead says in his famous old Chronicles:—

This year (1540), in the month of August, Sir James Hamilton of Finbert, Knight, Controller to the King (James V. of Scotland), who charged him in the king’s name to go toward within the castel of Edinburgh, which commandment he willingly obeyed, thinking himself sure enough, as well by reason of the good service he had done to the king, specially in repairing the palaces of Striviling and Linlithgow, as also that the king had him in so high favour, that he stood in no fear of himself at all. Nevertheless, shortlie after he was brought forth to judgement, and convicted in the Tolboth of Edinburgh, of certain points of treason, laid against him, which he would never confesse; but that notwithstanding, he was beheaded in the month of September next insuing, after that he had liberallie confessed at the place of execution, that he had never in any jot offended the king’s majesty; and that his death was yet worthilie inflicted upon him by the Divine justice, because he had often offended the law of God to please the prince, thereby to obtain greater countenance with him. Wherefore he admonished all persons, that moved by his example, they should rather follow the Divine pleasure than unjustlie seek the king’s favour, since it is better to please God than man.

Several parallels to Solomon’s judgment, I. Kings iii. 16–28, are recorded. One occurs in Gesta Romanorum. Three youths, to decide a question, are desired by their referee, the King of Jerusalem, to shoot at their father’s dead body. One only refuses; and to him, as the rightful heir, the legacy is awarded.

In the Harleian MS., 4523, we are told of a woman of Pegu, a province of Burmah, whose child was carried away by an alligator. Upon its restoration another woman claimed the child. The judge ordered them to pull for it; the infant cried, and one instantly quit her hold, to whom the child was awarded.

The same story, substantially, is told in the Pali commentary on the discourses of Buddha, translated by Rev. R. S. Hardy, as follows:—

A woman who was going to bathe, left her child to play on the banks of a tank, when a female who was passing that way carried it off. They both appeared before Buddha, and each declared the child was her own. The command was therefore given that each claimant should seize the infant by a leg and an arm, and pull with all her might in opposite directions. No sooner had they commenced than the child began to scream; when the real mother, from pity, left off pulling, and resigned her claim to the other. The judge therefore decided that, as she only had shown true affection, the child must be hers.

Suetonius tell us that the Emperor Claudius, when a woman refused to acknowledge her son, ordered them to be married. The mother confessed her child at once.

PRECEDENCY.

The Emperor Charles V. was appealed to, by two women of fashion at Brussels, to settle the point of precedency between them, the dispute respecting which had been carried to the greatest height. Charles, after affecting to consider what each lady had to say, decided that the greater simpleton of the two should have the pas; in consequence of which judgment the ladies became equally ready to concede the privilege each had claimed. Napoleon, on the occurrence of a similar difficulty at a Court ball supper, based his decision on the question of age. Mr. Hey, of Leeds, at a dinner-party of gentlemen, made merit the test.

In F. Johnson’s translation from the Sanscrit, occurs the following passage:—

In Ougein lived a Brahman named MÁdhava. His wife, of the Brahmanical tribe, who had recently brought forth, went to perform her ablutions, leaving him to take charge of her infant offspring. Presently a person from the Raja came for the Brahman to perform for him a PÁrrana s’rÁddha (a religious rite to all his ancestors.) When the Brahman saw him, being impelled by his natural poverty, he thought within himself: If I go not directly, then some one else will take the s’rÁddha. It is said:—

“In respect of a thing which ought to be taken, or to be given, or of a work which ought to be done, and not being done quickly, time drinks up the spirit thereof.”

But there is no one here to take care of the child: what can I do then? Well: I will go, having set to guard the infant this weasel, cherished a long time, and in no respect distinguished from a child of my own. This he did and went. Shortly afterwards, a black serpent, whilst silently coming near the child, was killed there, and rent into pieces by the weasel; who, seeing the Brahman coming home, ran towards him with haste, his mouth and paws all smeared with blood, and rolled himself at his feet. The Brahman seeing him in that state, without reflecting, said, “My son has been eaten by this weasel,” and killed him: but as soon as he drew near and looked, behold the child was comfortably sleeping, and the serpent lay killed! Thereupon the Brahman was overwhelmed with grief.

This fable was introduced to give point to the moral:—The fool who, without knowing the true state of the case, becomes subject to anger, will find cause for regret. Its similarity to the well-known Welsh legend is so remarkable that we append Spencer’s touching ballad.

Art has parallel stories of a tragic nature. In the

stands an exquisite example of Gothic tracery-work, known as the Apprentice’s Pillar, neighbored by corbels carved with grim, grotesque human faces. How it came by its name may best be told as the old dame who acted as cicerone at the beginning of the present century used to tell it.

“There ye see it, gentlemen, with the lace-bands winding sae beautifully roond aboot it. The maister had gane awa to Rome to get a plan for it, and while he was awa, his ’prentice made a plan himsel, and finished it. And when the maister cam back and fand the pillar finished, he was sae enraged that he took a hammer and killed the ’prentice. There you see the ’prentice’s face—up there in ae corner wi’ a red gash in the brow, and his mother greetin’ for him in the corner opposite. And there, in another corner, is the maister, as he lookit just before he was hanged; it’s him wi’ a kind o’ ruff roond his face.”

In the same century that the Prince of Orkney founded the chapel at Roslin, the good people of Stendal employed an architect of repute to build them one new gate, and entrusted the erection of a second to his principal pupil. In this case, too, the aspiring youth proved the better craftsman, and paid the same penalty; the spot whereon he fell beneath his master’s hammer being marked to this day by a stone commemorating the event; and the story goes that yet, upon moonlight nights, the ghost of the murdered youth may be seen contemplating the work that brought him to an untimely end, while a weird skeleton beats with a hammer at the stone he wrought into beauty.

Another stone, at Grossmoringen, close by Stendal, tells where an assistant bell-caster was stabbed by his master because he succeeded in casting a bell, after the latter had failed in the attempt. It is a tradition of Rouen that the two rose-windows of its cathedral were the work of the master-architect and his pupil, who strove which of the two should produce the finer window. Again the man beat the master, and again the master murdered the man in revenge for his triumph. The transept window of Lincoln Cathedral was the product of a similar contest, but in this instance the defeated artist killed himself instead of his successful rival.

BALLADS AND LEGENDS.

Scott’s ballad of “Wild Darrell” was founded upon a story, first told by Aubrey, but for which the poet was indebted to Lord Webb Seymour. An old midwife sitting over her fire one dark November night was roused by a loud knocking at the door. Upon opening it she saw a horseman, who told her her services were required by a lady of rank, and would be paid for handsomely; but as there were family reasons why the affair should be kept secret, she must submit to be conducted to her patient blindfolded. She agreed, allowed her eyes to be bandaged, and took her place on the pillion. After a journey of many miles, her conductor stopped, led her into a house, and removed the bandage. The midwife found herself in a handsome bedchamber, and in presence of a lady and a ferocious-looking man. A boy was born. Snatching it from the woman’s arms, the man threw the babe on the blazing fire; it rolled upon the hearth. Spite of the entreaties of the horrified midwife, and the piteous prayers of the poor mother, the ruffian thrust the child under the grate, and raked the hot coals over it. The innocent accomplice was then ordered to return whence she came, as she came; the man who had brought her seeing her home again, and paying her for her pains.

The woman lost no time in letting a magistrate know what she had seen that November night. She had been sharp enough to cut a piece out of the bed-curtain, and sew it in again, and to count the steps of the long staircase she had ascended and descended. By these means the scene of the infanticide was identified, and the murderer Darrell, Lord of Littlecote House, Berkshire was tried at Salisbury. He escaped the gallows by bribing the judge, only to break his neck in the hunting-field a few months afterwards, at a place still known as Darrell’s Stile. Aubrey places Littlecote in Wiltshire, makes the unhappy mother the waiting-maid of Darrell’s wife, and concludes his narration thus: “This horrid action did much run in her (the midwife’s) mind, and she had a desire to discover it, but knew not where ’twas. She considered with herself the time that she was riding, and how many miles she might have ridden at that rate in that time, and that it must be some great person’s house, for the room was twelve feet high. She went to a justice of the peace, and search was made—the very chamber found. The knight was brought to his trial; and, to be short, this judge had this noble house, park, and manor, and (I think) more, for a bribe to save his life. Sir John Popham gave sentence according to law, but being a great person and a favorite, he procured a nolle prosequi.”

In Sir Walter’s ballad the midwife becomes a friar of orders gray, compelled to shrive a dying woman,

and when

It was hardly fair to make Darrell worse than he was, by laying a second murder at his door, merely to give a local habitation and a name to a Scotch tale of murder that might have been an adaptation of the Berkshire tragedy.

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Somewhere about the beginning of the last century, an Edinburgh clergyman was called out of his bed at midnight on the pretext that he was wanted to pray with a person at the point of death. The good man obeyed the summons without hesitation, but wished he had not done so, when, upon his sedan-chair reaching an out-of-the-way part of the city, its bearers insisted upon his being blindfolded, and cut his protestations short by threatening to blow out his brains if he refused to do their bidding. Like the sensible man he was, he submitted without further parley, and the sedan moved on again. By and by, he felt he was being carried up-stairs: the chair stopped, the clergyman was handed out, his eyes uncovered, and his attention directed to a young and beautiful lady lying in bed with an infant by her side. Not seeing any signs of dying about her, he ventured to say so, but was commanded to lose no time in offering up such prayers as were fitting for a person at the last extremity. Having done his office, he was put into the chair and taken down-stairs, a pistol-shot startling his ears on the way. He soon found himself safe at home, a purse of gold in his hand, and his ears still ringing with the warning he had received, that if he said one word about the transaction, his life would pay for the indiscretion. At last he fell off to sleep, to be awakened by a servant with the news, that a certain great house in the Canongate had been burned down, and the daughter of its owner perished in the flames. The clergyman had been long dead, when a fire broke out on the very same spot, and there, amid the flames, was seen a beautiful woman, in an extraordinarily rich night-dress of the fashion of half a century before. While the awe-struck spectators gazed in wonder, the apparition cried, “Anes burned, twice burned; the third time I’ll scare you all!” The midwife of the Littlecote legend and the divine of the Edinburgh one were more fortunate than the Irish doctor living at Rome in 1743; this gentleman, according to Lady Hamilton, being taken blindfolded to a house and compelled to open the veins of a young lady who had loved not wisely, but too well.

BURIAL ALIVE.

In the year 1400, Ginevra de Amiera, a Florentine beauty, married, under parental pressure, a man who had failed to win her heart, that she had given to Antonio Rondinelli. Soon afterwards the plague broke out in Florence; Ginevra fell ill, apparently succumbed to the malady, and being pronounced dead, was the same day consigned to the family tomb. Some one, however, had blundered in the matter, for in the middle of the night, the entombed bride woke out of her trance, and badly as her living relatives had behaved, found her dead ones still less to her liking, and lost no time in quitting the silent company, upon whose quietude she had unwittingly intruded. Speeding through the sleep-wrapped streets as swiftly as her clinging cerements allowed, Ginevra sought the home from which she had so lately been borne. Roused from his slumbers by a knocking at the door, the disconsolate widower of a day cautiously opened an upper window, and seeing a shrouded figure waiting below, in whose upturned face he recognized the lineaments of the dear departed, he cried, “Go in peace, blessed spirit,” and shut the window precipitately. With sinking heart and slackened step, the repulsed wife made her way to her father’s door, to receive the like benison from her dismayed parent. Then she crawled on to an uncle’s, where the door was indeed opened, but only to be slammed in her face by the frightened man, who, in his hurry, forgot even to bless his ghostly caller. The cool night air, penetrating the undress of the hapless wanderer, made her tremble and shiver, as she thought she had waked to life only to die again in the cruel streets. “Ah” she sighed, “Antonio would not have proved so unkind.” This thought naturally suggested it was her duty to test his love and courage: it would be time enough to die if he proved like the rest. The way was long, but hope renerved her limbs, and soon Ginevra was knocking timidly at Rondinelli’s door. He opened it himself, and although startled by the ghastly vision, calmly inquired what the spirit wanted with him. Throwing her shroud away from her face, Ginevra exclaimed, “I am no spirit, Antonio; I am that Ginevra you once loved, who was buried yesterday—buried alive!” and fell senseless into the welcoming arms of her astonished lover, whose cries for help soon brought down his sympathizing family to hear the wondrous story, and bear its heroine to bed, to be tenderly tended until she bad recovered from the shock, and was as beautiful as ever again. Then came the difficulty. Was Ginevra to return to the man who had buried her, and shut his doors against her, or give herself to the man who had saved her from a second death? With such powerful special pleaders as love and gratitude on his side, of course Rondinelli won the day, and a private marriage made the lovers amends for previous disappointment. They, however, had no intention of keeping in hiding, but the very first Sunday after they became man and wife, appeared in public together at the cathedral, to the confusion and wonder of Ginevra’s friends. An explanation ensued, which satisfied everybody except the lady’s first husband, who insisted that nothing but her dying in genuine earnest could dissolve the original matrimonial bond. The case was referred to the bishop, who, having no precedent to curb his decision, rose superior to technicalities, and declared that the first husband had forfeited all right to Ginevra, and must pay over to Rondinelli the dowry he had received with her: a decree at which we may be sure all true lovers in fair Florence heartily rejoiced.

This Italian romance of real life has its counterpart in a French cause cÉlÈbre, but the Gallic version unfortunately lacks names and dates; it differs, too, considerably in matters of detail; instead of the lady being a supposed victim of the plague, which in the older story secured her hasty interment, she was supposed to have died of grief at being wedded against her inclination; instead of coming to life of her own accord, and seeking her lover as a last resource, the French heroine was taken out of her grave by her lover, who suspected she was not really dead, and resuscitated by his exertions, to flee with him to England. After living happily together there for ten years, the strangely united couple ventured to visit Paris, where the first husband accidentally meeting the lady, was struck by her resemblance to his dead wife, found out her abode, and finally claimed her for his own. When the case came for trial, the second husband did not dispute the fact of identity, but pleaded that his rival had renounced all claim to the lady by ordering her to be buried, without first making sure she was dead, and that she would have been dead and rotting in her grave if he had not rescued her. The court was saved the trouble of deciding the knotty point, for, seeing that it was likely to pronounce against them, the fond pair quietly slipped out of France, and found refuge in “a foreign clime, where their love continued sacred and entire, till death conveyed them to those happy regions where love knows no end, and is confined within no limits.”

RING STORIES.

Of dead-alive ladies brought to consciousness by sacrilegious robbers, covetous of the rings upon their cold fingers, no less than seven stories, differing but slightly from each other, have been preserved; in one, the scene is laid in Halifax; in another, in Gloucestershire; in a third, in Somersetshire; in the fourth, in Drogheda; the remaining three being appropriated by as many towns in Germany.

Ring-stories have a knack of running in one groove. Herodotus tells us how Amasis advised Polycrates, as a charm against misfortune, to throw away some gem he especially valued; how, taking the advice, Polycrates went seaward in a boat, and cast his favorite ring into the ocean; and how, a few days afterward, a fisherman caught a large fish so extraordinarily fine, that he thought it fit only for the royal table, and accordingly presented it to the fortunate monarch, who ordered it to be dressed for supper; and lo! when the fish was opened, the surprised cook’s astonished eye beheld his master’s cast-away ring; much to that master’s delight, but his adviser’s dismay; for when Amasis heard of the wonderful event, he immediately dispatched a herald to break his contract of friendship with Polycrates, feeling confident the latter would come to an ill end, “as he prospered in everything, even finding what he had thrown away.” The city of Glasgow owes the ring-holding salmon figuring in its armorial bearings to a legend concerning its patron saint, Kentigern, thus told in the Acta Sanctorum: A queen who formed an improper attachment to a handsome soldier, put upon his finger a precious ring which her own lord had conferred upon her. The king, made aware of the fact, but dissembling his anger, took an opportunity, in hunting, while the soldier lay asleep beside the Clyde, to snatch off the ring, and throw it into the river. Then returning home along with the soldier, he demanded of the queen the ring he had given her. She sent secretly to the soldier for the ring, which could not be restored. In great terror, she then despatched a messenger to ask the assistance of the holy Kentigern. He, who knew of the affair before being informed of it, went to the river Clyde, and having caught a salmon, took from the stomach the missing ring, which he sent to the queen. She joyfully went with it to the king, who, thinking he had wronged her, swore he would be revenged upon her accusers; but she, affecting a forgiving temper, besought him to pardon them as she had done. At the same time, she confessed her error to Kentigern, and solemnly vowed to be more careful of her conduct in future. In 1559, a merchant and alderman of Newcastle, named Anderson, handling his ring as he leaned over the bridge, dropped it into the Tyne. Some time after, his servant bought a salmon in the market, in whose stomach the lost ring was found: its value enhanced by the strange recovery, the ring became an heirloom and was in the possession of one of the Alderman’s decendants some forty years ago. A similar accident, ending in a similar way, is recorded to have happened to one of the dukes of Lorraine.

DEATH PROPHECIES.

Monk Gerbert, who wore the tiara as Sylvester II., a man of whom it was said that—thanks to the devil’s assistance—he never left anything unexecuted which he ever conceived, anticipating Roger Bacon, made a brazen head capable of answering like an oracle. From this creature of his own, Gerbert learned he would not die until he had performed mass in Jerusalem. He thereupon determined to live forever by taking good care never to go near the holy city. Like all dealers with the Evil One, he was destined to be cheated. Performing mass one day in Rome, Sylvester was seized with sudden illness, and upon inquiring the name of the church in which he had officiated, heard, to his dismay, that it was popularly called Jerusalem; then he knew his end was at hand; and it was not long before it came. Nearly five hundred years after this event happened, Master Robert Fabian, who must not be suspected of inventing history, seeing, as sheriff and alderman, he was wont to pillory public liars, wrote of Henry IV., “After the feast of Christmas, while he was making his prayers at St. Edward’s shrine, he became so sick, that such as were about him feared that he would have died right there; wherefore they, for his comfort, bare him into the abbot’s place, and lodged him in a chamber; and there, upon a pallet, laid him before the fire, where he lay in great agony a certain time. At length, when he was come to himself, not knowing where he was, he freyned [asked] of such as were there about him what place that was; the which shewed to him that it belonged unto the Abbot of Westminster; and for he felt himself so sick, he commanded to ask if that chamber had any special name. Whereunto it was answered, that it was named Jerusalem. Then said the king, ‘Laud be to the Father of Heaven, for now I know I shall die in this chamber, according to the prophecy of me beforesaid, that I should die in Jerusalem;’ and so after, he made himself ready, and died shortly after, upon the Day of St. Cuthbert, on the 20th day of March, 1413.”

BATTLES.

Three of the most famous battles recorded in English history were marked by a strange contrast between the behavior of the opposing armies on the eve of the fight. At Hastings, the Saxons spent the night in singing, feasting, and drinking; while the Normans were confessing themselves and receiving the sacrament. At Agincourt, “the poor condemned English” said their prayers, and sat patiently by their watch-fires, to “inly ruminate the morrow’s danger;” while the over-confident French revelled the night through, and played for the prisoners they were never to take. “On the eve of Bannockburn,” says Paston, who fought there on the beaten side, “ye might have seen the Englishmen bathing themselves in wine, and casting their gorgets; there was crying, shouting, wassailing, and drinking, with other rioting far above measure. On the other side we might have seen the Scots, quiet, still, and close, fasting the eve of St. John the Baptist, laboring in love of the liberties of their country.” Our readers need not be told that in each case the orderly, prayerful army proved victorious, and so made the treble parallel perfect.

BISHOP HATTO.

The legend of Hatto, bishop of Mayence, has been preserved in stanzas which are well remembered by school children. To avoid the importunity of the starving during a period of famine, the wicked prelate collected them into a barn,

Thereupon he was attacked by an army of mice, and escaped to his tower (the MÄuseschloss) on a rock in the Rhine. But they quickly followed him and poured in by thousands, “in at the windows and in at the door,” until he was overpowered and destroyed.

The same story is told of the Swiss baron, von GÜttingen, who was pursued and devoured by mice in his castle in Lake Constance. It is also told, with a variation, of the Polish King Popiel. When the Poles murmured at his bad government, and sought redress, he summoned the chief remonstrants to his palace, poisoned them, and had their bodies thrown into the lake Gopolo. He sought refuge from the mice within a circle of fire, but was overrun and eaten by them.