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March 12th
Born: Godfrey
Bidloo, anatomist, 1649, Amsterdam; John Thomas
Desaguliers, philosophical writer, 1683, Rochelle;
Bishop G. Berkeley, philosopher, 1684, Kilcrin,
Kilkenny; John Frederick Daniell, chemist and
meteorologist, 1790, Essex-street, Strand.
Died: Caesar
Borgia, killed, 1508, Castle of Vicuna; Alexander
Piccolomini, Italian miscellaneous writer, 1578,
Siena; Ludovick Muggleton, sectarian (Muggletonians),
1697; the Rev. Dr. George Gregory, editor of the Ness
Annual Register, 1808, West Ham; Rev. It. Polwhele,
topographer and poet, 1838.
Feast Day: St
Maximilian of Numidia, martyr, 296. St. Paul of
Cornwall, bishop of Leon, about 573. St. Gregory the
Great, Pope, 604.
ST. GREGORY THE
GREAT
There have been Popes
of every shade of human character. Gregory the Great
is one distinguished by modesty, disinterestedness,
and sincere religious zeal, tempered by a toleration
which could only spring from pure benevolence. The son
of a Roman senator, with high mental gifts, and all
the accomplishments of his age, he was drawn forward
into prominent positions, but always against his will.
He would have fain continued to be an obscure monk or
a missionary, but his qualities were such that at
length even the popedom was thrust upon him (on the
death of Pelagius II in 590). On this occasion he
wrote to the sister of the Emperor:
'Appearing to be
outwardly exalted, I am really fallen. My endeavours
were to banish corporeal objects from my mind, that I
might spiritually behold heavenly joys. I am come into
the depths of the sea, and the tempest hath drowned
me.'
The writings of Pope
Gregory, which fill four folio volumes, are said to be
very admirable. The English King Alfred showed his
appreciation of one treatise by translating it. In
exercising the functions of his high station, Gregory
exhibited great mildness and forbearance. He eagerly
sought to convert the heathen, and to bring heretics
back to the faith: but he never would sanction the
adoption of any harsh. measures for these purposes.
One day�before he attained the papal chair�walking
through the market in Rome, he was struck by the
beauty of a group of young persons exposed to be sold
as slaves. In answer to his inquiry of who they were,
and whence they came, he was told they were Angli,
from the heathen island of Britain. 'Verily, Angeli,'
he said, punning on the name: 'how lamentable that the
prince of darkness should be the master of a country
containing such a beautiful people! How sad that, with
so fair an outside, there should be nothing of God's
grace within! His wish was immediately to set out
as a missionary to England, and it was with difficulty
he was prevented. The incident, however, led to a
mission being ere long sent to our then benighted
country, which thus owed its first reception of
Christian light to Gregory.
Almsgiving, in such
Protestant countries as England, is denounced as not
so much a lessening of human suffering as a means of
engendering and extending pauperism. Gregory had no
such fears to stay his bountiful hand. With him to
relieve the poor was the first of Christian graces. He
devoted a large proportion of his revenue and a vast
amount of personal care to this object. He in a manner
took the entire charge of the poor upon his own hands.
'He relieved their necessities with. so much sweetness
and affability, as to spare them the confusion of
receiving alms; the old men among them he, out of
deference, called his fathers. He often entertained
several of them at his own table. He kept by him an
exact catalogue of the poor, called by the ancients
Matriculae; and he liberally provided for the
necessities of each. In the beginning of every month
he distributed to all the poor corn, wine, pulse,
cheese, fish, flesh, and oil; he appointed officers
for every street, to send every day necessaries to all
the needy sick: before he ate, he always sent off
meats from his own table to some poor persons.' There
may be some bad moral results from this wholesale
system of relief for poverty, but certainly the
motives which prompted it must be acknowledged to have
been highly amiable.
Gregory was a weakly
man, often suffering from bad health, and he did not
get beyond the age of sixty-four. We owe to him a
phrase which has become a sort of formula for the
popes�'Servant of the servants of God.' His name,
which is the same as Vigilantius or Watchman, became,
from veneration for him, a favourite one: we find it
borne, amongst others, by a Scottish prince of the
eighth century, the reputed progenitor of the clan
M'Gregor. It is curious to think of this formidable
band of Highland outlaws of the seventeenth century as
thus connected by a chain of historical circumstances
with the gentle and saintly Gregory, who first caused
the lamp of Christianity to be planted in England.
BISHOP BERKELEY
Dr. George Berkeley,
better known as Bishop Berkeley, the mathematician and
ideal philosopher, graduated at Trinity College,
Dublin, which he entered as a pensioner at the early
age of fifteen. Very different opinions prevailed
about him at College: those who knew little of him
took him for a fool, while those who were most
intimate with him considered him a prodigy of
learning. His most intimate friends were the best
judges in this case, for before he reached his
twenty-third year he competed for and obtained a
fellowship. Within the next three years he published
his Theory of Vision, a work of remarkable sagacity,
and the first of its kind. Its object may be roughly
stated to be an attempt, and a successful one, to
trace the boundary line between our ideas of sight and
touch. He supposed that if a man born blind could be
enabled to see, it would be impossible for him to recognise any object by sight
which he had previously
known by touch, and that such a person would have no
idea of the relative distance of objects.
This supposition was
confirmed in a very surprising manner in the year
1728, eighteen years after the publication of Mr.
Berkeley's book by a young man who was born blind and
couched by Mr. Cheseldon. He said that all objects
seemed to touch his eyes: he was unable to distinguish
the dog from the cat by sight, and was so sorely
puzzled between his newly-acquired sense and that of
touch that he asked which was the lying sense. In the
next year Berkeley published his Principles of Human
Knowledge, in which he set forth his celebrated system
of immaterialism, attempting to prove that the common
notion of the existence of matter is false, and that
such things as bricks and mortar, chairs and tables,
are nonentities, except as ideas in the mind. A
further defence of this system, in Three Dialogues
between Hylas and Philonous, established his
reputation as a writer, and his company was sought
even where his opinions were rejected. Through
Dean
Swift he was introduced to the celebrated Earl of
Peter-borough, whom he accompanied to Italy in the
capacity of chaplain.
His first piece of
preferment was the Deanery of Derry. And no sooner was
he settled in this than he conceived and carried out
to the utmost of his power a project which entitles
him to the admiration of posterity. It was nothing
less than a scheme for the conversion of the savage
Americans to Christianity. He proposed to erect a
college in Bermuda as a missionary school, to resign
his deanery, worth �1,100 a year, and to go out
himself as its first president, on the stipend of �100
a year. His plan was approved by parliament, and he
set out, taking with him three other noble and kindred
spirits. For seven years Sir R. Walpole delayed him
with various excuses, and at last gave him to
under-stand that the promised grant would not be paid
till it suited 'public convenience,' thus rendering
the whole scheme abortive.
In 1733, he was
appointed to the bishopric of Cloync. The rest of his
life was devoted to the earnest discharge of his
episcopal duties and the further prosecution of his
studies. His custom was to rise between three and four
o'clock, summon his family to a music lesson, and
spend the rest of the morning in study. In this part
of his life, he published The Analyst, which was
followed by several other works, among which was a
letter to the Roman Catholics of his diocese, entitled
A Word to the Wise, for which in the Dublen Journal of
November 18, 1749, they returned 'their sincere and
hearty thanks to the worthy author, assuring him that
they are deter-mined to comply with every particular
recommended in his address to the utmost of their
power.'
Suffering a good deal
from a nervous colic towards the end of his life, and
finding relief from tar-water, he wrote a treatise on
its virtues, which, with its sequel,
Further Thoughts on Tar-water, was his last
work for the press. He died at Oxford, suddenly, in
the midst of his family, on Sunday evening, January
14, 1753, while listening to a sermon of Dr.
Sherlock's which Mrs. Berkeley was reading to him. He
was interred in Christ Church, Oxford.
LUDOVICK MUGGLETON
A time of
extraordinary religious fervour is sure to produce its
monsters, even as the hot mud of the Nile was fabled
to do by Lucretius. Several arose amidst the dreadful
sectarian contendings of the period of the civil war,
and scarcely any more preposterous than Ludovick
Muggleton, who is said to have been a working tailor,
wholly devoid of education. About 1651, when this man
was between forty and fifty years of age, he and a
brother in trade, named Reeves, announced themselves
as the two last witnesses of God that would ever be
appointed on earth: professed a prophetic gift, and
pretended to have been invested with an exclusive
power over the gates of heaven and hell. When Reeves
died, Muggleton continued to set himself forth in this
character, affecting to bless those who respectfully
listened to him, and cursing all who scoffed at him,
assuming, in short, to have the final destiny of man,
woman, and child entirely in his own hand.
By ravings
in speech and print, he acquired a considerable number
of followers, chiefly women, and became at length such
a nuisance, that the public authorities resolved, if
possible, to put him down. His trial at the Old
Bailey, January 17th, 1677, ended in his being sentenced
to stand in the pillory on three
days in three
several parts of London, and to pay a fine of �500, or
be kept in jail in failure of payment. His books were
at the same time ordered to be publicly burnt. All
this severity Muggleton outlived twenty years, dying
at length at the age of ninety, and leaving a sect
behind him, called from him Muggletonians.
It would serve to
little good purpose to go farther into the history of
this wretched fanatic. One anecdote, however, may be
related of him. It happened on a day, when Muggleton
was in his cursing mood, that he very energetically
devoted to the infernal deities a gentleman who had
given him some cause of offence. The gentleman
immediately drew his sword, and placing its point at
the cursing prophet's breast, demanded that the
anathemas just pronounced should be reversed upon pain
of instant death. Muggleton, who had no relish for a
martyrdom of this kind, assumed his blessing capacity,
and gave the fiery gentleman the fullest satisfaction.
There is no mention
of Muggletomans in the official report of the census
of 1851, though it included about a dozen small sects,
under various uncouth denominations. As late as 1846,
some of Muggleton's incomprehensible rhapsodies were
reprinted and published, it is sincerely to be hoped
for the last time.
THE TRAFFIC OF
WOMEN'S HAIR
As a rule, the women
of England do not sell their hair. There is, however,
in England, a large and regular demand for this
article, to make those supposititious adornments which
one sees in every hair-dresser's window. It is stated
that a hundred thousand pounds' weight of human hair
is required to supply the demand of the English
market. It is mainly brought from the continent, where
women of the humbler rank may be said to
cherish their hair with a view to selling it for
money. Light hair comes mostly from Belgium and
Germany, dark from France and Italy. There is a Dutch
company, the agents of which make annual visits to the
towns and villages of Germany, buying the tresses of
poor women.
In France the trade is mostly in the hands
of agents, sent out by large firms at Paris. These
agents, going chiefly to the Breton villages, take
with them a supply of silks, laces, ribbons,
haberdashery, and cheap jewellery, which they barter
with the peasant women and girls for their tresses.
Mr. Trollope, while travelling in Brittany, saw much
of this singular hair-cropping going on; as the women
in that province all wear close-fitting caps, the
difference between the cropped and the uncropped was
not so perceptible as it otherwise would have been.
The general price is said to vary from about one franc
to five francs for a head of hair half a pound to a
pound in weight: but choice specimens occasionally
command more than their weight in silver, owing to the
eager competition of buyers to obtain them.
In England, something
of this kind is going on in country villages, but not
(it is supposed) to any great extent. A feeling of
womanly pride rebels against it. Occasionally,
however, evidence peeps out to show that poor
Englishwomen know that there is a market for such a
commodity. One instance of a ludicrous kind occurred
at a metropolitan police-court some years ago. On
March 12
th, 1825, the court was thronged by a
number
of poor women, who seemed excited and uncomfortable,
and who whispered among themselves as to who should be
the spokeswoman to tell the tale which all evidently
desired should be told. At length one of them, with a
manner half ashamed, told the magistrate that one
Thomas Rushton, a barber, called at her poor abode one
day, and asked politely to look at her hair. Whether
she guessed his errand, is not clear: but she took off
her cap at his bidding. He professed to be in raptures
with the beauty of her hair, and offered her a guinea
for it. Being in straitened circumstances she accepted
the offer. The rogue at once took out his scissors,
and cut off the whole of her hair. 'See, your
worship,' said she, 'what he has done.' His worship
did see, and found that there were only little stumps
of hair left like pig's bristles. The fellow put her
hair in his hat, put the hat on his head, and ran off
without giving her a single coin. All the other women
in the court had been defrauded of their tresses in a
similar way, and probably all on the same day�for the
rogue could not afford to wait until the exploit got
wind. The poor women declared that they had been
rendered quite miserable when they came to show their
husbands their cropped heads�which may well be
imagined.
It may be added that,
about a hundred years ago, when false hair was perhaps
more in use than it is now, a woman residing in a
Scotch burgh used to get a guinea from time to time
for her tresses, which were of a bright golden hue.
March 13th
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