International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science — Volume 1, No. 3, July 15, 1850

All these pleasing images seemed to flit before me while putting into rhyme the "Song of Prince Hoel,"—but before I could write it down, tidings reached me of the illness, (perhaps incurable,) of him who drew it from the oblivion of its native Welsh.

Death already has robbed me of so much, that I have become, as it were, inured to grief, and accustomed, even in my least unhappy moments to reflect on the incertitude of all earthly hopes and wishes. I can now hear of losses with melancholy rather than with horror.

So much of the soul of Robert Southey has been dispersed about the world that a translation to some other state of being, (now, before time has given him any burthen to carry,) would be, perhaps, no misfortune, except to those left to sorrow. Yet to know that so benevolent a being is still existing, feeling, joying, and suffering, on the sphere of our own mortality, awakens a feeling so nearly allied to pleasure that all who can appreciate excellence must entreat of Heaven the continuance upon earth of a contemporary of whom it may be said:

"VIRTUE AND HE ARE ONE!"

MISS LESLIE'S LIFE OF JOHN FITCH

It has been announced for years that Miss Leslie—the very clever but not altogether amiable magazinist—was engaged upon a memoir of JOHN FITCH, to whom, it has always seemed to us, was due much more than to Fulton, the credit of inventing the steamboat. While Fitch was in London, Miss Leslie's father was one of his warmest friends, and the papers of her family enable her to give many particulars of his history unknown to other biographers. When several years ago. R.W. Griswold published his Sketches of the Life and Labors of John Fitch, the late Noah Webster sent him the following interesting letter upon the subject:

DEAR SIR:—In your sketch of John Fitch you justly remarked that his biography is still a desideratum. The facts related of him by Mr. St. John to Mr. Stone, and published in the New York Commercial Advertiser, are new to me; and never before had I heard of Mr. Fitch at Sharon, in Connecticut; but I know Mr. St. John very well, and cannot discredit his testimony any more than I can Mr. Stone's memory. The substance of the account given of Mr. Fitch by the indefatigable J.W. Barber, in his Connecticut Historical Collections, is as follows: John Fitch was born in East Windsor, in Connecticut, and apprenticed to Mr. Cheney, a watch and clock-maker, of East Hartford, now Manchester, a new town separated from East Hartford. He married, but did not live happily with his wife, and he left her and went to New Brunswick, in New Jersey, where he set up the business of clock-making, engraving, and repairing muskets, before the revolution. When New Jersey was invaded by the British troops, Mr. Fitch removed into the interior of Pennsylvania, where he employed his time in repairing arms for the army.

Mr. Fitch conceived the project of steam navigation in 1785, as appears by his advertisement. He built his boat in 1787. In my Diary I have myself noted that I visited the boat, lying at the wharf in the Delaware, on the ninth day of February, 1787. The Governor and Council were so much gratified with the success of the boat that they presented Mr. Fitch with a superb flag. About that time, the company, aiding Mr. Fitch, sent him to France, at the request of Mr. Vail, our consul at L'Orient, who was one of the company. But this was when France began to be agitated by the revolution, and nothing in favor of Mr. Fitch was accomplished; he therefore returned. Mr. Vail afterward presented to Mr. Fulton for examination the papers of Mr. Fitch, containing his scheme of steam navigation. After Mr. Fitch returned to this country, he addressed a letter to Mr. Rittenhouse, in which he predicted that in time the Atlantic would be crossed by steam power; he complained of his poverty, and urged Mr. Rittenhouse to buy his land in Kentucky, for raising funds to complete his scheme. But he obtained no efficient aid. Disappointed in his efforts to obtain funds, he resorted to indulgence in drink; he retired to Pittsburgh, and finally ended his life by plunging into the Alleghany. His books and papers he bequeathed to the Philadelphia Library, with the injunction that they were to remain closed for thirty years. At the end of that period, the papers were opened, and found to contain a minute account of his perplexities and disappointments. Thus chiefly the narration of Mr. Barber, who refers for authority to the American edition of the Edinburgh Encyclopedia. It may be worth while for some gentleman to attempt to find these papers. N. WEBSTER.

    Rev. RUFUS W. GRISWOLD.

The papers to which Dr. Webster alludes in the above letter, have been examined by Miss Leslie, and the curious details they contain of Fitch's early life, his courtship, unfortunate marriage, captivity among the Indians, experiments, &c. will be embraced in her work, which will undoubtedly be one of the most interesting biographies of this country.

The director of the Museum of Paris has opened a very interesting gallery of American antiquities, from Yucatan, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, and other countries of the New World.

ILLUMINATED BOOKS

Mr. Owen Jones, an English architect, and the author of a very beautiful work on the Alhambra, has been enabled, by the curious process of chromo-lithography, originally discovered by the Bavarian, Alois Sennefelder, to popularize and multiply almost indefinitely the delicate and highly-finished illuminations executed by the pious monkish artists of the middle ages.

According to Felton, the manuscript illuminators "borrowed their title from the illumination which a bright genius giveth to his work," and they form the connecting link in the chain which unites the ancient with the modern schools of painting. Their works, considered as a subordinate branch of pictorial art, though frequently grotesque and barbarous, are singularly characteristic of the epoch in which they lived, whether we retrace the art to its Byzantine origin in the earliest ages of Christianity, or follow it to its most complete and harmonious development in the two centuries which preceded the discovery of the printing press.

The primitive Christians were possessed with an unconquerable repugnance to the introduction of images, and the first notice we have of the use of pictures is in the censure of the Council of Illiberis, 300 years after the Christian era. Of these one of the earliest and most curious specimens is the consecrated banner which animated the victorious soldiers of Constantine. The Labarum was a long pike, topped with a crown of gold, inclosing a monogram expressive of the cross and the two initial letters of the name of Christ, and intersected by a transverse beam, from which hung a silken vail curiously inwrought with the images of the reigning monarch and his children. A medal of the Emperor Constantius is said to be still extant in which the mysterious symbol is accompanied with the memorable words, "By this sign shalt thou conquer." The austere simplicity of the Primitive Christians yielded at length to this innovation of sacred splendor. Before the end of the sixth century the use and even the worship of images, or pictorial representations of sacred persons and subjects, was firmly established in the capital, and those "made without hands" were propagated in the camps and cities of the Eastern empire by monkish artists, whose flat delineations were in the last degeneracy of taste.

In the eighth century, Leo the Isaurian ascended the throne of the East, and for a time the public or private worship of images was proscribed, but the edict was vigorously and successfully resisted by the Latins of the Western church. Charlemagne, whose literary tastes are attested by his encouragement of the learned, by the foundation of schools, and by his patronage of the arts of music and painting, gave a great impulse to the practice of illumination: and the Benedictines, whose influence extended throughout Europe, assigned an eminent rank among monastic virtues to the guardianship and reproduction of valuable manuscripts. In each Benedictine monastery a chamber was set apart for this sacred purpose, and Charlemagne assigned to Alcuin, a member of their order, the important office of preparing a perfect copy of the Scriptures.

The process of laving on and burnishing gold and silver appears to have been familiar to oriental nations from a period of remote antiquity, and the Greeks are supposed to have acquired from them the art of thus ornamenting manuscripts, which they in turn communicated to the Latins. Their most precious manuscripts were written in gold or silver letters, on the finest semi-transparent vellum, stained of a beautiful violet color (the imperial purple), and these were executed only for crowned heads. One of the most ancient existing specimens of this mode of caligraphy in the fourth century, the Codex Argenteus of Ulphilas, the inventor of the Visigothic alphabet, was discovered in the library of Wolfenbüttel, and is now at Upsal, Sweden. This fine MS. is written in letters of gold and silver on a purple ground; and the fragments of a Greek MS. of the Eusebian Canons of the sixth century, preserved in the British Museum, is perhaps a unique example of a MS. in which both sides of the leaves are illuminated upon a golden ground. Mr. Owen Jones' illustrations commence with a page from the celebrated Durham book, or Gospels of St. Cuthbert, in the Hiberno-Saxon style of the seventh century, which was borrowed originally from the Romans, and afterward diffused throughout Europe by the itinerant-Saxon Benedictines. This style is formed by an ingenious disposition of interweaving threads or ribbons of different colors, varied by the introduction of extremely attenuated lizard-like reptiles, birds, and other animals. The initial letters are of gigantic size, and of extreme intricacy, and are generally surrounded with rows of minute red dots.

The Coronation Oath Book of the Anglo-Saxon kings is a curious specimen of the rude state of art in the ninth century. The Lombard and the Carlovingian styles, of which latter the Psalter of Charles the Bold, is a fine specimen, prevailed on the continent during the eighth and ninth centuries. Toward the end of the tenth century, the Anglo-Saxon school, under the patronage of Bishop Ethelwold, at Winchester, assumed a new and distinct character, which was not surpassed by any works executed at the same period. This style, with its bars of gold, forming complete frames to the text, when enriched with interweaving foliage of the acanthus and the ivy, became the basis of the latter and more florid school of illumination, which attained its highest perfection in the twelfth century, and of which the Arnstein Bible is an example. This Bible belonged to the Monks of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, of Arnstein, and the value which was attached to it may be inferred from the following quaint and mild anathema at the end of the first volume:—

"The book of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, in Arnstein, the which, if any one shall purloin it, may he die the death—may he be cooked upon the gridiron—may the falling sickness and fevers attack him—and may he be broken upon the wheel and hung!"

In the thirteenth century Paris became celebrated for its illuminators, and the productions of Franco-Bolognese, whose skill in illuminating manuscripts was then paramount, is mentioned by Dante. Mr. Humphreys thus graphically describes the style of the fourteenth century:—

"It was a great artistic era—the architecture, the painting, the goldsmith's work, the elaborate productions in enamel, and the illuminator's art, were in beautiful harmony, being each founded upon similar principles of design and composition; even the art of writing lending itself to complete the chord of artistic harmony, by adopting that, crisp and angular feeling which the then general use of the pointed arch introduced into all works of artistic combination."

THE PHANTOM WORLD.[1 - THE PHANTOM WORLD: a Philosophy of Spirits, Apparitions, &c. By AUGUSTINE CALMET. Edited by Rev. Henry Christmas.]

MR. CHRISTMAS, in his "Twin Giants," attacked the stronghold of popular superstition by exhibiting the foundations and growth of error in the early and ignorant ages, and of the progressive dissipation of these delusions as the light of history and science spread over the world. The present work is a translation from Calmet. It deals with spectres, vampyres, and all that tribe of visionary monsters. We have here the learning and opinion of the enlightened portion of the world a century ago. M. Calmet traversed all history for his facts, and gives us a mass of monkish inventions, which prove to what an extent the Romish church fostered superstition for its own purposes. We have dead men called from their graves to show the danger of neglecting to pay tithes, and to rivet on the rich the necessity of building churches, and paying liberally for masses. At p. 286 of vol. 1 we have a proof that the "knockings" which have made so much noise in the United States, are no novelty:—

"Humbert Birk, a burgess of note in the town of Oppenheim, had a country-house, called Berenbach. He died in the month of November, 1620, a few days before the feast of St. Martin. On the Saturday which followed his funeral they began to hear certain noises in the house where he had lived with his first wife; for at the time of his death he had married again. The master of this house, suspecting that it was his brother-in-law who haunted it, said to him: 'If you are Humbert, my brother-in-law, strike three times against the wall.' At the same time they heard three strokes only, for ordinarily he struck several times. Sometimes, also, he was heard at the fountain where they went for water, and he frightened all the neighborhood. He did not utter articulate sounds; but he would knock repeatedly, make a noise, or a groan or a shrill whistle, or sounds as of a person in lamentation."

This went on, at intervals, for a year, when the ghost found a voice, and told them to tell the cure to come there; and when he came he said he wanted three masses said for him, and alms given to the poor. The author has the following sensible observations on the modes in which ghost stories originate:—

"We call to our assistance the artifices of the charlatans, who do so many things which pass for supernatural in the eyes of the ignorant. Philosophers, by means of certain glasses, and what are called magic lanterns; by optical secrets, sympathetic powders: by their phosphorus, and, lately, by means of the electric machine, show us an infinite number of things which the simpletons take for magic, because they know not how they are produced. Eyes that are diseased do not see things as others see them, or else behold them differently. A drunken man will see objects double; to one who has the jaundice they will appear yellow: in the obscurity people fancy they see a spectre, where there is but the trunk of a tree.

"A mountebank will appear to eat a sword; mother will vomit coals, or pebbles. One will drink wine, and send it out again at his forehead; another will cut off his companion's head, and put it on again. You will think you see a chicken dragging a beam. The mountebank will swallow fire, and vomit it forth; he will draw blood from fruit; he will send from his mouth strings of iron nails; he will put a sword on his stomach, and press it strongly, and instead of running into him, it will bend back to the hilt. Another will run a sword through his body without wounding himself. You will sometimes see a child without a head, then a head without a child and all of them alive. That appears very wonderful; nevertheless, if it were known how all these things are done, people would only laugh, and be surprised that they could wonder at and admire such things."

If we are so easily deceived in these matters, is it strange that in peculiar states of mind or body, we are so completely imposed on in others? At p. 353 we have the story on which Goethe has founded a singular exploit of Mephistopheles in the cellar of Auerbach.

"John Faust Cudlington, a German, was requested, in a company of gay people, to perform in their presence some tricks of his trade. He promised to show them a vine loaded with grapes, ripe and ready to gather. They thought, as it was the month of December, he could not execute his promise. He strongly recommended them not to stir from their places, and not to lift up their hands to cut the grapes, unless by his express order. The vine appeared directly, covered with leaves and loaded with grapes, to the astonishment of all present. Every one took up his knife, awaiting the order of Cudlington to cut some grapes; but after having kept them some time in that expectation, he suddenly caused the vine and the grapes to disappear. Then every one found himself armed with his knife, and holding his neighbor's nose with one hand; so that if they had cut off a bunch without the order of Cudlington, they would have cut off one another's noses."

The book is curious and interesting and calculated to do away with much of the superstition which now appears to be gaining ground in almost every part of Christendom.

Authors and Books

George Sand, as elsewhere noted, has written her "Confessions," in the style of Rousseau, and a Paris bookseller has contracted to give her a fortune for them. The three greatest—intellectually greatest—women of modern times have lived in France and it is remarkable that they have been three of the most shamelessly profligate in all history. The worst of these, probably—Madame de Staël—left us no records of her long-continued, disgusting, and almost incredible licentiousness, so remarkable that Chateaubriand deemed her the most abandoned person in France at a period when modesty was publicly derided in the Assembly as a mere "system of refined voluptuousness." Few who have lately resided in Paris are ignorant of the gross sensualism of the astonishing Rachel, whose genius, though displayed in no permanent forms, is not less than that of the Shakspeare of her sex, the forever-to-be-famous Madame Dudevant, whose immoralities of conduct have perhaps been overdrawn, while those of De Staël and Rachel have rarely been spoken of save where they challenged direct observation. We perceive that Rachel is to be in New York next autumn, with a company of French actors.

Mr. G.P.R. James arrived in New York on the Fourth, and "landed amid discharges of artillery, the huzzas of assembled thousands, and such an imposing military display as is rarely seen in this country except on occasions of great moment and universal interest." He is certainly entitled to all the ceremonious honors he will receive during his summer in America, for no man living, probably, has contributed more to the quiet and rational pleasure of the people here than this prolific but always intelligent and gentlemanly author. We have it from the best authority that Mr. James does not intend in any way whatever to meddle with the copyright question, and that he will not write a book about us on his return to England. He visits the United States for a season's agreeable relaxation, with his family, comprising his wife and daughter and three sons. The London Morning Chronicle, in a review of one of his recent compositions, has the following piece of criticism, in contemplation of the present interruption of Mr. James's labors:—

"A season without two or three novels from Mr. James would be a marked year in the world of letters. There is not a power-loom in all Manchester which works with more untiring, unswerving regularity. Does Mr. James ever stop to think, to eat, to drink, to sleep? Is he ever sick? Has he ever a headache? Is he ever out of sorts, even as other men are, when they turn away from the inkstand as from a bottle of physic? We do not believe it. We sometimes doubt whether Mr. James be a man at all. Is he mortal? Has he flesh and blood, or is he some indefinite unheard-of machine, some anomaly of nature, some freak of creation, whose mission is to make novels—and who accordingly spins, spins away, and never leaves off for a moment—never! We know how M. Dumas manages to rear his wonderful literary offspring. With all Mr. James's fertility, however, the Frenchman has a thousand times Mr. James's invention. The romances of the latter are simply a series of ever-changing, yet never novel variations upon the one original theme furnished by Sir Walter Scott. Dumas, with his eighty volumes a year, yet manages to be ever fresh, ever new. Nobody knows, till he reads it, what a novel of the Frenchman's will be. Everybody, even before he cuts open page one, can tell you the certain features, the stereotyped characters, which flourish in eternal youth in the never-ending productions of James. It is only calling them by other names, and dressing them in different costumes—altering, in the description of a castle, the dais from the one end of the great hall to the other, or some such important revolution—and presto, Mr. James can whip the personages and the places who flourished in one country and in one century right slap into another generation and another land. The thing is done in a moment, and you have a new novel before you—just as new, at all events, as is any in his list of a hundred."

Botta's "Nineveh" has at last reached completion at Paris. It consists of five folio volumes of the largest size; only 400 copies have been printed; 300 of them are to be distributed by the Government, and 100 for booksellers, to be sold. The price is 1800 francs a copy, or about $600, the total expense of the edition being 296,000 fr. or not far from $55,000. The publication of the work on so expensive a scale, unaccompanied by an edition cheap enough for ordinary readers, is a great blunder; at least the reputation of the author suffers from it. The book does not reach those for whom it is written, while of Layard's work at least 10,000 copies have been sold, exclusive of the sale in America.

Arago announces that he will at last begin the printing of his long prepared but not yet published works. His health is deeply shattered. When the Provincial Government ceased to exist he was so weak that he could scarcely walk, but since then repose has considerably recruited his strength, but he does well to undertake the long postponed publication of his studies. The first issued will be on Measuring the Intensity of Light, which he is now reading to the Academy; subsequently he will bring out the Astronomy, so long waited for. It is true that some years since a book was printed with this title, composed from notes of some of his lectures; this work has passed through many editions and has been translated into other languages, though he has often protested against it as an entirely erroneous and perverted presentation of his ideas.

The Rev. H.W. Bellows has resigned the editorship of The Christian Enquirer, which he has conducted with distinguished ability, we believe from its commencement.

Miss Cooper, a daughter of the great novellist, has been announced in London as the author of "Rural Hours," a volume to be published in two or three weeks by Bentley, and by our Aldus, Mr. Putnam. We have read and in this number of the International give some extracts from the advance sheets of "Rural Hours," and we think the work will be regarded as one of the most pleasing and elegant contributions which woman has in a long time made to English literature. It is in the form of a year's diary in the country, and it illustrates on almost every page a large and wise cultivation, and the finest capacities for the observation of nature. We shall hereafter enter more fully into the discussion of its merits, but meanwhile advise the reader to obtain the book as soon as possible, in confidence that it will prove one of the most delightful souvenirs of the summer.

Prof. Agassiz of Harvard College appears in the last number of the Christian Examiner—an able periodical, which no degree or affectation of "liberality" should have tempted to the admission of such a paper—in an elaborate argument against the Unity of the Human Race. It is ridiculous to attempt a disguise of this matter: the proposition of Prof. Agassiz is an attack upon the Christian religion, and he is guilty of scandalous dishonesty in endeavoring to evade its being so considered. He has undoubtedly a right to pursue any investigation to which he may be led by a love of science, and, guarding himself about with humility and candor, he has a right to accept the results which may be offered in the premises by a careful induction. But the right to assail the commonly received opinions of mankind, especially the right to assail a people's religion, has other and very rigid conditions, which will not, we are persuaded, justify this new outbreak of the restless spirit of Infidelity. Certainly, it would have become Prof. Agassiz, before venturing upon the course he has adopted, to dissociate himself from a University to which so many of the youth of the country have been sent without any thought on the part of their parents that they were to be exposed there to influences which they would dread above all others. There is no right to offer, except to men, capable of its thorough apprehension, any new or questionable or unsettled doctrine. Prof. Agassiz should have been in a condition to receive in his own person the consequences of a failure to establish his theory. We have no fears as to the result of the controversy upon which he has entered. No man worthy to be called a Christian scholar, deprecates the subjection of the Bible to any tests that are possible. It has withstood in the last two centuries quite too much of sham science to be in any way affected by the logic of Prof. Agassiz. Still, the appearance of such a paper in the Christian Examiner