Born:
Dr.
John Jortin, eminent critic, 1698, London; Marshal
Andoche Junot, French commander, 1771, Bussy les
Forges; Francis Jeffrey,
eminent critic, 1773,
Edinburgh.
Died:
Annius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Latin philosopher,
beheaded by King Theodoric, 524; William Prynne,
author of Histrio Mastix, or The Scourge of Players,
1669, London; Jean Francois Vaillant, eminent
medalist, 1706; Anne Oldfield, celebrated actress,
1730, London.
Feast Day:
St. Theodoret, priest and martyr, 362. St. Severin,
archbishop of Cologne, confessor, 400. Another St.
Severin or Surin, bishop. St. Romanus, archbishop of
Rouen, confessor, 639. St. Ignatius, patriarch of
Constantinople, confessor, 878. St. John Capistran,
confessor, 1456.
WALLER'S SACHARISSA
Dorothy Sidney, Waller's Sacharissa,
lives in the memory of men as a literary curiosity; as
one of the brightest ornaments of virtue in the court
of Charles I, she is consigned to oblivion.
Dorothy Sidney was born in 1620. She
was the eldest of eight daughters, and the favourite
of both parents. Her father was Robert Sidney, Earl of
Leicester, and her mother, daughter of Henry Percy,
ninth Earl of Northumberland.
To compile the lives of poets out of
their works, is to build biography with treacherous
materials, and little is known of Waller's relations
to the lady of his verses, besides the meagre
information which is to be found in them. It appears
clear, however, that the poet proposed to her, and was
somewhat disdainfully rejected. He was then a widower,
popular at court, with a large estate and handsome
person. The lady was gentle and virtuous, Waller wild
and dissolute, and it might be supposed that his loose
habits stood in his way. But other suitors of 'dearest
Doll,' whose addresses were entertained, were by no
means faultless. The truth is, the parents could
countenance no one of less rank than a lord.
Waller was not inconsolable; he
presently found a comforter, though we would conceive
the transfer of his affections to have been a process
of some difficulty:
'All that of myself is mine,
Lovely Amoret, is thine:
Sacharissa's captive fain
Would untie his iron chain,
And, those scorching beams to shun,
To thy gentle shadow run.
If the soul had free election
To dispose of her affection,
I would not thus long have borne
Haughty Sacharissa's scorn:
But �tis sure some power above
Which controls our wills in love.'
Waller was soon afterwards married,
as also was Sacharissa herself, on July 11, 1639, to
Henry, third Lord Spencer, afterwards Earl of
Sunderland. Waller's anathemas on this occasion,
conveyed in a letter to Lady Lucy Sidney, another of
the sisters, are worthy of quotation:
'May my Lady Dorothy (if we may yet
call her so) suffer as much, and have the like passion
for this young lord, whom she has preferred to the
rest of mankind, as others have had for her; and may
this love, before the year go about, make her taste of
the first curse imposed on womankind the pains of
becoming a mother. May her first born be none of her
own sex, nor so like her but that he may resemble her
lord as much as herself. May she, that always affected
silence and retiredness, have the house filled with
the noise and number of her children, and hereafter of
her grandchildren; and then may she arrive at that
great curse, so much declined by fair ladies old age.
May she live to be very old, and yet seem young; be
told so by her glass, and have no aches to inform her
of the truth; and when she shall appear to be mortal,
may her lord not mourn for her, but go hand in hand
with her to that place where we are told there is
neither marrying nor giving in marriage; that, being
there divorced, we may all have an equal interest in
her again. My revenge being immortal, I wish all this
may also befall their posterity to the world's end,
and afterwards.'
Lady Sunderland was not so fortunate
as to have the poet's curses fulfilled. Her husband
was killed at the battle of Newbury, in 1643, and his
wife survived a second husband, whom she married in
1652. She died on the 25th February 1684, leaving one
son and one daughter by her first, and one son by her
second husband.
THE
IRISH MASSACRE
This fearful event, though its
atrocities have been denied or extenuated by party
zeal, is nevertheless but too well authenticated, and
constitutes a most painful phase in the history of
Ireland during the seventeenth century. There can be
no doubt that the natives of that country had been
harshly and unjustly treated by the English
government; they had been insulted and ground down by
all kinds of oppressive restrictions; their religion
had been proscribed; and large portions of their
territory, more especially in the province of Ulster,
had been confiscated and transferred to English and
Scottish colonists. Yet even all these provocations,
combined with a due allowance for the barbarous
condition of the time and country, will be wholly
insufficient to excuse or palliate the horrible
excesses which took place excesses reminding us of the
worst features of the Bartholomew massacre in France.
The hopes of the Irish had been
excited by the successful resistance made by the
Scotch to the arbitrary measures of Charles I, and the
prospect of reestablishing the supremacy of their
religion, as well as of regaining the lands which had
been bestowed on the English settlers, stirred them up
to the desigimment of a wide spread conspiracy and
revolt. The principal leaders were Roger Moore, a
gentleman of Kildare, with Cornelius Maguire, Baron of
Inniskillen, and Sir Phelim O'Neil, two chieftains of
Ulster.
The plot was successfully matured without the
English authorities having any idea of its existence
beyond receiving some obscure hints of a conspiracy
being in progress; and the 23
rd
of October 1641, was
fixed on as a day of general insurrection, to be
inaugurated by the surprise of the castle of Dublin.
The previous night, one of the confederates getting
drunk in a tavern, revealed the whole plot to an Irish
Protestant, named Owen O'Connelly, who communicated
the information to Sir William Parsons, one of the
lords justices, and the capital was saved.
The rising, however, as preconcerted,
burst forth in other parts of the country, and most
frightful scenes of cruelty and bloodshed ensued. The
Ulster colonists, dwelling in profound peace and the
prosecution of a prosperous industry, were taken
completely by surprise, and butchered promiscuously,
without distinction of age or sex, by the savage and
infuriated natives. In the words of Lord Clarendon,'
they who escaped best were robbed of all they had, to
their very shirts, and so turned naked to endure the
sharpness of the season; and by that means, and for
want of relief, many thousands of them perished by
hunger and cold.' The rebellion spread with frightful
rapidity, and in less than a fortnight many of the
fairest tracts in Ireland, which the enterprise of the
British colonists had reclaimed and adorned, were
converted into waste and desolation, as if it had been
the object of the devastators to obliterate every
trace of English occupancy.
Energetic measures were at once
taken by the Long Parliament, on hearing of this
outbreak, to effect its suppression, but it
nevertheless continued to rage for nearly two years.
Great exaggeration was made as to the number of
persons who actually perished, but after rejecting all
extravagant estimates, it seems to be clearly ascertained,
that from the beginning of the insurrection to its
end, nearly fifty thousand individuals were murdered
in cold blood; and this is exclusive of those who fell
with arms in their hands on the field of battle, or
endured every indignity and suffering short of death.
BATTLE OF EDGEHILL: REMARKABLE CASES
OF SUSPENDED ANIMATION
The battle of Edgehill, in which
both the Royalist and Parliamentary party claimed the
victory, took place on the morning of Sunday, October
23, 1642. Amongst those who fell on the king's side,
and were left on the field as dead, was Sir Gervase
Scroop, who had fallen covered with wounds about three
o'clock on Sunday afternoon. It was not till Tuesday
evening that his son, who was also in the king's
forces, was able to return to the battlefield to
search for the body of his father. When he found it,
it was perfectly naked, having been stripped, like the
rest of the slain, on Sunday evening, by camp
plunderers. In this state it had lain all Sunday
night, all Monday, and Monday night, and was
apparently dead, having received no less than sixteen
severe wounds. Monday night, it ought to be stated,
had been remarkably cold and frosty. Sir Gervase's son
carried him to a lodging near at hand, and fancied he
felt in the body some degree of heat. 'That heat,'
says Fuller, 'was, with rubbing, within few minutes,
improved into motion; that motion, within some hours,
into sense; that sense, within a day, into speech;
that speech, within certain weeks, into a perfect
recovery; living more than ten years after, a monument
of God's mercy and his son's affection.
The effect of his story I received
from his own mouth:
'The next day (Wednesday, 26th
October), another gentleman, named Bellingham, was
found in a like condition among the dead, having
received twenty wounds. Being carried off by his
friends, he also was restored, and lived for ten days,
but died subsequently from one of his wounds
terminating in a gangrene. 'The surgeons were of
opinion,' says Clarendon, 'that both these gentlemen
owed their lives to the inhumanity of those who
stripped them, and to the coldness of the nights,
which stopped their blood, better than all their skill
and medicaments could have done, and that if they had
been brought off within any reasonable distance of
time after their wounds, they had undoubtedly
perished.'
In connection with the subject of
unexpected reanimation, the case of Sir Hugh Ackland,
of Kellerton, Devonshire, may he mentioned as even
more extraordinary. This gentleman was seized with a
violent fever, and having apparently expired, had been
laid out as dead. The nurse and two footmen were
appointed to sit up through the night to watch the
corpse. Lady Ackland, to cheer them, had sent them a
bottle of brandy, whereupon one of the footmen, 'being
an arch rogue,' said to the other:
'Master dearly loved brandy when he
was alive, and now, though he is dead, I am determined
he shall have a glass with us!'
Accordingly, he poured out a bumper,
and forced it down Sir Hugh's throat. A gurgling noise
immediately ensued, accompanied with a violent motion
of the neck and upper part of the chest. A terrible
consternation seized the watchers, who rushed
violently down stairs; 'the brandy genius' with such
speed, that he fell, and rolled head over heels,
bumping down from step to step till he reached the
bottom; while the nurse screamed with terror. The
noise having roused a young gentleman who was sleeping
in the house, he immediately got up, and went to the
room where the noise had first begun. There, to his
astonishment, he saw Sir Hugh sitting upright on the
bed. He summoned the servants, and ordering them to
place their master in a warm bed, sent off for his
medical attendants.
In a few weeks, Sir Hugh was
restored to perfect health, and lived many years
afterwards. He often used to relate this strange story
of his own resuscitation by his footman's facetious
conceit, for which he is said to have bequeathed him a
handsome annuity.