No More Learning

” The epigrammatist has no mission to fulfill; and the
form as well as the volume of his works enables him to touch every
aspect of life into the boldest relief. Especially interesting is the
modernness of these touches; and it would startle a stranger to see
how slight an adaptation or perversion of an epigram or a line or a
word produces anticipatory echoes of present-day experiences, in their
extremest or most peculiar features.


## p. 9753 (#161) ###########################################

MARTIAL
9753
Generally speaking, the Romans were humorous after the dry
kind, while the Greeks were witty; but Greek comedy and epigram
are as humorous as those of any nation, and Martial vindicates the
Roman capacity for triumphant wit - a wit that shows all the colors
of all the nationalities. The wit of America, of France, of Ireland,
cross and blend with each other in Martial's epigrams; and even trav-
esties like the American mockery of Hebrew or negro idiosyncra-
sies find illustration. Puns, parodies, paradoxes, refrains, antitheses,
alliterations, echoes and surprises of all sorts are there, with some
curious antetypes of modern slang, of present provincial or proverb-
ial usages, and even of some points of recent comic songs. In the
versions here appended, literalness has been sacrificed to spirit; the
characteristic features of the original have been preserved in a mod-
ern countenance and expression. In the small space at command,
preference has been given to our poet's wit rather than his other
qualities, as being the special characteristic of himself and of the
epigram; though the omission of other specimens is a sacrifice of his
dues.
The only notable edition of Martial is Friedländer's with Ger-
man notes, the school manuals being inadequate and unsympathetic.
There is no great translation, the French renderings in prose and
verse being the best complete reproduction; there are admirable ver-
sions of individual epigrams in all the modern languages. Sellar's
monographs in the Encyclopædia Britannica) and his "Selections
from Martial' give perhaps the best brief estimate of the poet in
our tongue.
Carnie
Harrism.
THE UNKINDEST CUT
L
AST night as we boozed at our wine,
After having three bottles apiece,
You recall that I asked you to dine,
And you've come, you absurdest of geese!
I was maudlin, you should have been mellow,
All thought of the morrow away:
Well, he's but a sorry good fellow
Whose mind's not a blank the next day!


## p. 9754 (#162) ###########################################

9754
MARTIAL
EVOLUTION
A
SURGEON once - a sexton now twin personages:
Identical professions, only different stages!
VALE OF TEARS
LONE she never weeps her father's death;
When friends are by, her tears time every breath.
Who weeps for credit, never grief hath known;
He truly weeps alone, who weeps alone!
A
SIC VOS NON VOBIS
I
F THAT the gods should grant these brothers twain
Such shares of life as Leda's Spartans led,
A noble strife affection would constrain,
For each would long to die in brother's stead;
And he would say who first reached death's confine,
"Live, brother, thine own days, and then live mine! ”
SILENCE IS GOLDEN
OU'RE pretty, I know it; and young, that is true;
And wealthy — there's none but confesses that too:
But you trumpet your praises with so loud a tongue
That you cease to be wealthy or pretty or young!
You
SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR
YES
,
ES, New and I both here reside:
Our stoops you see are side by side;
And people think I'm puffed with pride,
And envy me serenely blessed,
With such a man for host and guest.
The fact is this — he's just as far
As folks in Borrioboola Gha.
What! booze with him ? or see his face,
Or hear his voice? In all the place
There's none so far, there's none so near!
We'll never meet if both stay here!
To keep from knowing New at all,
Just lodge with him across the hall!


## p. 9755 (#163) ###########################################

MARTIAL
9755
THE LEAST OF EVILS
HILE some with kisses Julia smothers,
Reluctant hand she gives to others:
Give me thy merest finger-tips,
Or anything - but not thy lips!
W
THOU REASON’ST WELL
TER
He atheist swears there is no God
And no eternal bliss:
For him to own no world above
Doth make a heaven of this.
NEVER IS, BUT ALWAYS TO BE
<<
Yºu
(
always say
to-morrow, ” “to-morrow” you will live;
But that “to-morrow," prithee, say when will it arrive ?
How far is't off ? Where is it now? Where shall I go to
find it?
In Afric's jungles lies it hid? Do polar icebergs bind it?
It's ever coming, never here; its years beat Nestor's hollow!
This wondrous thing, to call it mine, I'll give my every dollar!
Why, man, to-day's too late to live — the wise is who begun
To live his life with yesterday, e'en with its rising sun!
LEARNING BY DOING
A
s MITHRADATES used to drink the deadly serpent's venom,
That thus all noxious things might have for him no mis-
chief in 'em,-
So Skinner feeds but once a day with scanty preparation,
To teach his folks to smile unfed nor suffer from starvation.
TERTIUM QUID
W**
HEN poets, croaking hoarse with cold,
To spout their verses seek,
They show at once they cannot hold
Their tongues, yet cannot speak.


## p. 9756 (#164) ###########################################

9756
MARTIAL
SIMILIA SIMILIBUS
I
WONDER not that this sweetheart of thine
Abstains from wine;
I only wonder that her father's daughter
Can stick to water.
CANNIBALISM
W
ITHOUT roast pig he never takes his seat:
Always a boor- a boar — companions meet!
"
YO
EQUALS ADDED TO EQUALS
ask why I refuse to wed a woman famed for riches:
Because I will not take the veil and give my wife the breeches.
The dame, my friend, unto her spouse must be subservient quite:
No other way can man and wife maintain their equal right.
THE COOK WELL DONE
THY call me a bloodthirsty, gluttonous sinner
For pounding my chef when my peace he subverts?
If I can't thrash my cook when he gets a poor dinner,
Pray how shall the scamp ever get his deserts ?
W"
A DIVERTING SCRAPE
M
Y SHAVER, barber eke and boy,-
One such as emperors employ
Their hirsute foliage to destroy,–
I lent a friend as per request
To make his features look their best.
By test of testy looking-glass
He mowed and raked the hairy grass,
Forgetful how the long hours pass;
He left my friend a perfect skin,
But grew a beard on his own chin!


## p. 9757 (#165) ###########################################

MARTIAL
9757
DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND
Youp
ou'd marry Crichton, Miss Jemima:
Smart for you!
But somehow he won't come to time. Ah!
He's smart too!
THE COBBLER'S LAST
PK
.
REDESTINED for patching and soling,
For fragrance of grease, wax, and thread,
You find yourself squire by cajoling,
When with pigs you should hobnob instead;
And midst your lord's vertu you're rolling,
With liquor and love in your head!
How foolish to send me to college,
To soak up unpractical views!
How slow is the progress of knowledge
By the march of your three-dollar shoes!
BUT LITTLE HERE BELOW
H"
is grave must be shallow,— the earth on him light, -
Or else you will smother the poor little mite.
E PLURIBUS UNUS
Hen hundreds to your parlors rush,
You wonder I evade the crush?
Well, frankly, sir, I'm not imbued
With love of social solitude.
W"
FINE FRENZY
L
ONG and Short will furnish verse
To market any fake :
Do poets any longer dream,
Or are they wide-awake?


## p. 9758 (#166) ###########################################

9758
MARTIAL
LIVE WITHOUT DINING
NY
Z
ow, if you have an axe to grind, or if you inean to spout,
If your invite is to a spread, then you must count me out:
I do not like that dark-brown flask, I dread the thought of
gout,
I'm restless at the gorgeous gorge that ostentation dares.
My friend must offer me pot-luck on wash-days unawares;
I like my feed when his menu with my own larder squares.
THE TWO THINGS NEEDFUL
Hº
OW grand your gorgeous mansion shows
Through various trees in stately rows!
Yet two defects its splendors spite:
No charmed recess for tedious night -
No cheerful spot where friends may dine-
Well, your non-residence is fine!


## p. 9759 (#167) ###########################################

9759
JAMES MARTINEAU
(1805-)
wo names overtop all others in the history of English Unita-
rian thought and leadership,- Joseph Priestley and James
Martineau. Priestley died in 1804, and Martineau was born
the following year, April 21st, coming of a Huguenot family which
had been long settled in England. From his father he inherited the
gentleness and refinement of his nature, from his mother that intel-
lectual strength in which his celebrated sister Harriet so fully shared.
His education began at the Grammar School” in Norwich, where
his father was a manufacturer and wine
merchant; and was continued at Bristol with
Dr. Lant Carpenter, then a prominent Uni-
tarian minister, but now best known as the
father of the scientist W. B. Carpenter and
Mary the philanthropist. The next step
was to the workshop, with a view to mak-
ing himself a civil engineer. This phase
of his experience enriched his mind with
the materials for many a brilliant metaphor
in his writings, wonderful to his readers
until they know his early history. But his
heart was not in his ork; and at length
his father yielded to his solicitations, and JAMES MARTINEAU
assuring him that he was courting pov-
erty,” sent him to Manchester New College, which was then at
York,-a lineal descendant of that Warrenton Academy in which
Priestley taught and Malthus was educated, but already, in 1824, a
Unitarian theological school. Here Martineau was graduated in 1827,
and soon after became junior pastor of a church in Dublin, nominally
Presbyterian like most of the early Unitarian churches in England
and Ireland. Already distinguished as a preacher of great eloquence
and fervor, upon the death of his senior he refused to take that sen-
ior's place because it entailed the regium donum: a gift of the Crown
to Protestant ministers, which he thought discriminated unfairly
against Roman Catholics. His next charge was in Liverpool, whither
he went in 1832, and in 1836 published his first book, Rationale of
Religious Enquiry,' which was strikingly in advance of the current



## p. 9760 (#168) ###########################################

9760
JAMES MARTINEAU
)
Unitarian thinking. In 1839 he made himself a great reputation in
the famous Liverpool Controversy); accepting, with the Unitarians
Thom and Giles, the challenge of thirteen clergymen of the Estab-
lished Church to a public debate. Martineau's contribution was the
most brilliant and effective ever made to Unitarian controversial writ-
ing. This success may have done something to set the habit of his
life; for it is certain that it has ever since been stoutly controver-
sial,— his numerous essays and reviews, and even his most import-
ant books, being cast for the inost part in a controversial mold, while
his sermons frequently take on a controversial character without any
of the personalities which the other things involve.
In 1840 he was made professor of mental and moral philosophy in
Manchester New College; which, following its peripatetic habit, in
1841 returned from York to Manchester, went to London in 1847, and
to Oxford in 1889. Martineau was connected with it as professor,
and for many years as its head, until 1885. In the mean time he
had removed from Liverpool to London, in 1857, after ten years of
journeying there to his lectures and back to his pastoral work. The
substance of his college work is embodied in his ‘Types of Ethical
Theory) (1885), A Study of Religion (1888), and The Seat of
Authority in Religion (1890).
The critical radicalism of the last of these volumes did much to
alienate the sympathies of those whose religious conservatism had
attracted them to the two others, and to the general working of his
mind as opposed to the materialistic tendencies which were domi-
nant and aggressive in the third quarter of the century. But as a
critic of the New Testament and Christian origins there was nothing
in "The Seat of Authority to astonish or surprise any one acquainted
with the course of his development. In this respect he had been
consistently radical from first to last. Some of the most radical posi-
tions in the book will be found, germinal if not developed, in his
reviews and studies of a much earlier date. The result of his criti-
cisms was, for himself, a conception of Jesus and his work in history
which, ethically and spiritually, transcended any that he found in
the traditional presentation, but was strictly within the limits of a
humanitarian view.
If Martineau's theological and philosophical position was conserva-
tive as compared with his criticism, it was so only from the accident
of a temporary swaying of the pendulum of thought towards materi-
alism a tendency which has already reached its term, and which no
English writer has done so much to counteract as he. But an intui-
tive philosophy, anti-materialistic, anti-necessarian, anti-utilitarian, was
not a conservative but a radical philosophy from 1840 until 1860; and
this was the philosophy of Martineau in those years of earnest thought


## p. 9761 (#169) ###########################################

JAMES MARTINEAU
9761
(
and active change. He had begun as an ardent disciple of Locke
and Hartley and Priestley: serving out his captivity with them
more patiently because of the idealization of their doctrine by the
younger Mill, who as early as 1841 noticed in a syllabus of Marti-
neau's lectures that he was falling away from his allegiance to the
empirical school, and begged to have the lectures printed lest he
should be studying them in another state of existence” were their
publication long delayed. In a little while Martineau found himself
bound “to concede to the self-conscious mind itself, both as knowing
and willing, an autonomous function distinct from each and all of
the phenomena known, and changes willed, - a self-identity as unlike
a
as possible to any growing aggregate of miscellaneous and dissimilar
experiences. This involved a surrender of determinism and a revis-
ion of the doctrine of causation. In 1848–9 he spent fifteen months in
Germany, studying with Trendelenburg, and was soon brought into
the same plight with reference to the cognitive and æsthetic side of
life that had already befallen him in regard to the moral. He had
become a metaphysician, — the possible as real for him as the actual,
noumena as real as phenomena, mind central to the universe, and God
a righteous will.
It would be difficult to find a more brilliant series of writings —
culminating in the elaborate treatises of 1885, 1887, 1890 — than those
in which Martineau defended his new-found philosophic faith. He
had many foemen worthy of his pen. In the persons of Mansel and
Spencer he opposed himself to Agnosticism before Huxley had named
the terrible child, and while it was provisionally called Nescience.
Against Tyndall and others as the prophets of Materialism, he put
forth his utmost strength. In the great battle with Determinism and
Utilitarianism he met all those who came up against him with a dia-
lectic supple and keen as a Damascus sword. On these several fields
he was a recognized captain of the host, and obtained the admiration
and the gratitude of many who could not abide his Unitarian faith.
His scientific knowledge was so large that it enabled him to cope
with noble confidence with scientists venturing across his lines. He
has lived to see many of the bolder of them retreating from positions
too rashly taken up; but that his own are final is not to be supposed.
One may greatly admire him, and yet conceive that he has been far
more apt in finding what is weakest in the philosophical and reli-
gious implications of a transitional science, than in appropriating
those scientific elements which make for a more satisfactory solution
of the universal mystery than any yet obtained.
But if Martineau had not been master in philosophy and ethics,
he would still have been one of the most distinguished preachers of
his sect and time. His most helpful books have been his volumes
XVII-611


## p. 9762 (#170) ###########################################

9762
JAMES MARTINEAU
of sermons, especially the two volumes (1843-7) Endeavors after a
Christian Life. The published sermons of his later life are too much
overcrowded by the fear that the materialists be upon us. They
have not the joyous march and song of the 'Endeavors. ' A pene-
trating spirituality is the dominant note of all his works; a passion
for ideal truth and purity. The beauty of holiness shines from every
page as from the preacher's face. His style, though marvelously
brilliant, has undoubtedly been a deduction from his influence. It is
so rich with metaphor that it dazzles the reader more than it illumi-
nates the theme. Moreover, we are arrested by the beauty of the
expression as by a painted window that conceals what is beyond.
Nevertheless, for those straining after an ideal perfection, his sermons
are as music to their feet. He has won the unbounded love and
reverence of his own household of faith; and in his ninety-third year
(1897) is, with Gladstone, one of the most impressive figures on the
century's narrowing verge. All the great universities of Great Brit-
ain, America, and Continental Europe long since accorded him their
highest honors.
THE TRANSIENT AND THE REAL IN LIFE
From Hours of Thought on Sacred Things )
Job xii. 22: "He discovereth deep things out of darkness; and bringeth
out to light the shadow of Death. ”
1
T is the oldest, as it is the newest, reproach of the cynic against
the devout, that they construe the universe by themselves;
attribute it to a will like their own; tracing in it imaginary
vestiges of a moral plan, and expecting from it the fulfillment of
their brilliant but arbitrary dreams. Instead of humbly sitting at
the feet of Nature, copying her order into the mind, and shap-
ing all desire and belief into the form of her usages and laws,
they turn out their own inward life into the spaces of the world,
and impose their longings and admirations on the courses and
issues of Time. With childish self-exaggeration, it is said, we
fancy creation governed like a great human life,- peopled with
motives, preferences, and affections parallel to ours,- its light
and heat, its winds and tides, its seasons and its skies, adminis-
tered by choice of good or ill, transparent with the flush of an
infinite love, or suffused with the shadow of an infinite displeas-
We set at the helm of things a glorified humanity; and
that is our God. We think away from society the cries of wrong
ure.


## p. 9763 (#171) ###########################################

JAMES MARTINEAU
9763
and the elements of sin, leaving only what is calm and holy; and
that is our Kingdom of Heaven. We picture to ourselves youth
that never wastes, thought that never tires, and friendship with-
out the last adieu; and that is our immortality. Religion, we
are assured, is thus born of misery: it is the soul's protest against
disappointment and refusal to accept it, the pity which our nature
takes upon its own infirmities, and is secured only on the pathos
of the human heart.
Be it so. Are you sure that the security is not good ? Are
we so made as to learn everything from the external world,
and nothing out of ourselves? Grant the allegation.
Let our
diviner visions be the native instinct, the home inspiration, of
our thought and love: are they therefore false because we think
them ? illusory, because beautiful relatively to us? Am I to be-
lieve the register of my senses, and to contradict the divinations
of conscience and the trusts of pure affection? Is it a sign of
highest reason to deny God until I see him, and blind myself to
the life eternal till I am born into its surprise ? Nothing more
arbitrary, nothing narrower, can well be conceived, than to lay
down the rule that our lowest endowment - the perceptive pow-
ers which introduce us to material things - has the monopoly
of knowledge; and that the surmises of the moral sense have
nothing true, and the vaticinations of devoted love only a light
that leads astray. The wiser position surely is, that the mind
is a balanced organ of truth all round,- that each faculty sees
aright on its own side of things, and can measure what the
others miss: the hand, the palpable; the eye, the visible; the
imagination, the beautiful; the spirit, the spiritual; and the will,
the good. How else indeed could God and Heaven, if really
there, enter our field of knowledge, but by standing thus in rela-
tion to some apprehensive gift in us, and emerging as the very
condition of its exercise and the attendant shadow of its move-
ments ?
And in truth, if we are not strangely self-ignorant, we must
be conscious of two natures blended in us, each carrying a sep-
arate order of beliefs and trusts, which may assert themselves
with the least possible notice of the other. There is the nature
which lies open to the play of the finite world, gathers its expe-
rience, measures everything by its standard, adapts itself to its
rules, and discharges as fictitious whatever its appearances fail
to show. And underlying this, in strata far below, there is the


## p. 9764 (#172) ###########################################

9764
JAMES MARTINEAU
nature which stands related to things infinite, and heaves and
stirs beneath their solemn pressure, and is so engaged with them
as hardly to feel above it the sway and ripple of the transi-
tory tides. Living by the one, we find our place in nature; by
the other, we lose ourselves in God. By the first, we have our
science, our skill, our prudence; by the second, our philosophy,
our poetry, our reverence for duty. The one computes its way
by foresight; the other is self-luminous for insight. In short,
the one puts us into communication with the order of appear-
ances; the other with eternal realities. It is a shallow mind
which can see to the bottom of its own beliefs, and is conscious
of nothing but what it can measure in evidence and state in
words; which feels in its own guilt no depth it cannot fathom,
and in another's holiness no beauty it can only pine to seize;
which reads on the face of things - on the glory of the earth
and sky, on human joy and grief, on birth and death, in pity
and heroic sacrifice, in the eyes of a trusting child and the com-
posure of a saintly countenance no meanings that cannot be
printed; and which is never drawn, alone and in silence, into
prayer exceeding speech. Things infinite and divine lie too near
to our own centre, and mingle in too close communion, to be
looked at as if they were there instead of here: they are given
not so much for definition as for trust; are less the objects we
think of than the very tone and color of our thought, the ten-
sion of our love, the unappeasable thirst of grief and reverence.
Till we surrender ourselves not less freely to the implicit faiths
folded up in the interior reason, conscience, and affection, than to
the explicit beliefs which embody in words the laws of the out-
ward world, we shall be but one-eyed children of Nature, and
utterly blind prophets of God.
No doubt these two sides of our humanity, supplying the
temporal and the spiritual estimates of things, are at ceaseless
variance; they reckon by incommensurable standards, and the
answers can never be the same. The natural world, with the
part of us that belongs to it, is so framed as to make nothing
of importance to us except the rules by which it goes, and to
bid us ask no questions about its origin; since we have equally
to fall in with its ways, be they fatal or be they divine. But to
our reason in its noblest exercise, it makes a difference simply
infinite, whether the universe it scans is in the hands of dead
necessity or of the living God. This, which our science ignores,


## p. 9765 (#173) ###########################################

JAMES MARTINEAU
9765
no
is precisely the problem which our intellect is made to ponder.
Again, our social system of rights and obligations is constructed
on the assumption that with the springs of action we have no
concern: they fulfill all conditions, if we ask nothing and give
nothing beyond the conduct happiest in its results. But the nat-
ural conscience flies straight to the inner springs of action as
its sole interest and object; it is there simply as an organ for
interpreting them, and finding in them the very soul of right-
eousness: that which the outward observer shuns is the inward
spirit's holy place. And once more, Nature, as the mere mother
of us all, takes small account in this thronged and historic world of
the single human life; repeating it so often as to render it cheap;
short as it is, often cutting its brief thread; and making each
one look so like the other that you would say it could not matter
who should go. But will our private love, which surely has the
nearer insight, accept this estimate ? Do we, when its treasure
has fallen from our arms, say of the term of human years, “It
has been enough ” ? — that the possibilities are spent; that the
cycle of the soul is complete; and that with larger time and
renovated opportunity, it could learn and love and serve
more? Ah no! to deep and reverent affection there is an aspect
under which death must ever appear unnatural; and its cloud,
after lingering awhile till the perishable elements are hid, grows
transparent as we gaze, and half shows, half veils, a glorious
image in the depth beyond. Tell me not that affection is blind,
and magnifies its object in the dark. Affection blind! I say there
is nothing else that can see; that can find its way through the
windings of the soul it loves, and know how its graces lie. The
cynic thinks that all the fair look of our humanity is on the out-
side, inasmuch as each mind will put on its best dress for com-
pany; and if there he detects some littleness and weakness, which
perhaps his own cold eye brings to the surface, there can be
only what is worse within. Dupe that he is of his own wit! he
has not found out that all the evil spirits of human nature flock
to him; that his presence brings them to the surface from their
recesses in every heart, and drives the blessed angels to hide
themselves away: for who would own a reverence, who tell a
tender grief, before that hard ungenial gaze? Wherever he moves,
he empties the space around him of its purest elements: with his
low thought he roofs it from the heavenly light and the sweet
air; and then complains of the world as a close-breathed and


## p. 9766 (#174) ###########################################

9766
JAMES MARTINEAU
stifling place. It is not the critic, but the lover, who can know
the real contents and scale of a human life; and that interior
estimate, as it is the truer, is always the higher: the closest look
becomes the gentlest too; and domestic faith, struck by bereave-
ment, easily transfigures the daily familiar into an image con-
genial with a brighter world.
Our faculties and affections are graduated then to objects
greater, better, fairer, and more enduring, than the order of
nature gives us here. They demand a scale and depth of being
which outwardly they do not meet, yet inwardly they are the
organ for apprehending. Hence a certain glorious sorrow must
ever mingle with our life: all our actual is transcended by our
possible; our visionary faculty is an overmatch for our experi-
ence; like the caged bird, we break ourselves against the bars
of the finite, with a wing that quivers for the infinite. To stifle
this struggle, to give up the higher aspiration, and be content
with making our small lodgings snug, is to cut off the summit
of our nature, and live upon the flat of a mutilated humanity.
To let the struggle be, however it may sadden us, to trust the
pressure of the soul towards diviner objects and more holy life,
and measure by it the invisible ends to which we tend,- this
is true faith; the unfading crown of an ideal and progressive
nature. It is indeed, and ever must be, notwithstanding the
light that circles it, a crown of thorns; and the brow that wears
it can
never wholly cease to bleed. A nature which reaches
forth to the perfect from a station in the imperfect must always
have a pathetic tinge in its experience. Think not to escape it
by any change of scene, though from the noisy streets to the
eternal City of God. There is but One for whom there is no
interval between what he thinks and what he is; in whom there.
fore is “light, and no darkness at all. ” For us, vain is the
dream of a shadowless world, with no interruption of brilliancy,
no remission of joy. Were our heaven never overcast, yet we
meet the brightest morning only in escape from recent night;
and the atmosphere of our souls, never passing from ebb and
flow of love into a motionless constancy, must always break the
white eternal beams into a colored and a tearful glory. Whence
is that tincture of sanctity which Christ has given to sorrow, and
which makes his form at once the divinest and most pathetic in
the world ? It is that he has wakened by his touch the illimit-
able aspirations of our bounded nature, and flung at once into


## p. 9767 (#175) ###########################################

JAMES MARTINEAU
9767
our thought and affection a holy beauty, a divine Sonship, into
which we can only slowly grow. And this is a condition which
can never cease to be. Among the true children of the Highest,
who would wish to be free from it? Let the glorious burden
lie! How can we be angry at a sorrow which is the birth-pang
of a diviner life?
From this strife, of infinite capacity with finite conditions,
spring all the ideal elements which mingle with the matter of
our being.
Nor is it our conscience only that betrays the secret
of this double life. Our very memory too, though it seems but
to photograph the actual, proves to have the artist's true select-
ing power, and knows how to let the transient fall away, and
leave the imperishable undimmed and clear. As time removes
us from each immediate experience, some freshening dew, some
wave of regeneration, brightens all the colors and washes off the
dust; so that often we discover the essence only when the acci-
dents are gone, and the present must die from us ere it can
truly live. The work of yesterday, with its place and hour, has
but a dull look when we recall it. But the scene of our childish
years,—the homestead, it may be, with its quaint garden and
its orchard grass; the bridge across the brook from which we
dropped the pebbles and watched the circling waves; the school-
house in the field, whose bell broke up the game and quickened
every lingerer's feet; the yew-tree path where we crossed the
church-yard, with arm round the neck of a companion now be-
neath the sod, - how soft the light, how tender the shadows, in
which that picture lies! how musical across the silence are the
tones it Aings! The glare, the heat, the noise, the care, are
gone; and the sunshine sleeps, and the waters ripple, and the
lawns are green, as if it were in Paradise. But in these minor
religions of life, it is the personal images of companions loved
and lost that chiefly keep their watch with us, and sweeten and
solemnize the hours. The very child that misses the mother's
appreciating love is introduced, by his first tears, to that thirst
of the heart which is the early movement of piety, ere yet it has
got its wings. And I have known the youth who through long
years of harsh temptation, and then short years of wasting decline,
has, from like memory, never lost the sense as of a guardian angel
near, and lived in the enthusiasm, and died into the embrace,
of the everlasting holiness. In the heat and struggle of mid-life,
it is a severe but often a purifying retreat to be lifted into the


## p. 9768 (#176) ###########################################

9768
JAMES MARTINEAU
lonely observatory of memory, above the fretful illusions of the
moment, and in presence once more of the beauty and the sanc-
tity of life. The voiceless counsels that look through the vision-
ary eyes of our departed steal into us behind our will, and sweep
the clouds away, and direct us on a wiser path than we should
know to choose. If age ever gains any higher wisdom, it is
chiefly that it sits in a longer gallery of the dead, and sees
the noble and saintly faces in further perspective and more vari-
ous throng. The dim abstracted look that often settles on the
features of the old, - what means it ? Is it a
mere fading of
the life ? an absence, begun already, from the drama of humanity ?
a deafness to the cry of its woes and the music of its affections ?
Not always so: the seeming forgetfulness may be but brightened
memory; and if the mists lie on the outward present, and make
it as a gathering night, the more brilliant is the lamp within
that illuminates the figures of the past, and shows again, by their
flitting shadows, the plot in which they moved and fell.
It is through such natural experiences — the treasured sanctities
of every true life — that God “discovereth to us deep things out
of darkness, and turneth into light the shadow of death. ” They
constitute the lesser religions of the soul; and say what you will,
they come and go with the greater, and put forth leaf and blos-
som from the same root. We are so constituted throughout-in
memory, in affection, in conscience, in intellect — that we cannot
rest in the literal aspect of things as they materially come to
No sooner are they in our possession, than we turn them
into some crucible of thought, which saves their essence and pre-
cipitates their dross; and their pure idea emerges as our lasting
treasure, to be remembered, loved, willed, and believed. What
we thus gain, then,- is it a falsification ? or a revelation? What
we discard,- is it the sole constant, which alone we ought to
keep? or the truly perishable, which we deservedly let slip? If
the vision which remains with us is fictitious, then is there a
fatal misadjustment between the actual universe and the powers
given us for interpreting it; so that precisely what we recognize
as highest in us — the human distinctions of art, of love, of duty,
of faith — must be treated as palming off upon us a system of
intellectual frauds. But if the idealizing analysis be true, it is
only that our faculties have not merely passive receptivity, but
discriminative insight, are related to the permanent as well as to
the transient, and are at once prophetic and retrospective; and
us.


## p. 9769 (#177) ###########################################

JAMES MARTINEAU
9769
thus are qualified to report to us, not only what is, but what
ought to be and is to be. Did we apply the transforming imagi-
nation only to the present, so as to discern in it a better possi-
bility beyond, it might be regarded as simply a provision for the
progressive improvement of this world, - an explanation still carry-
ing in itself the thought of a beneficent Provider. But we glorify
no less what has been than what now is; and see it in a light in
which it never appeared beneath the sun: and this is either an
illusion or a prevision.
The problem whether the transfiguring powers of the mind
serve upon us an imposture or open to us a divine vision, carries
in its answer the whole future of society, the whole peace and
nobleness of individual character. High art, high morals, high
faith, are impossible among those who do not believe their own
inspirations, but only court and copy them for pleasure or profit.
And for great lives, and stainless purity, and holy sorrow, and
surrendering trust, the souls of men must pass through all vain
semblances, and touch the reality of an eternal Righteousness
and a never-wearied Love.


## p. 9770 (#178) ###########################################

9770
ANDREW MARVELL
(1621-1678)
»
ONDREW MARVELL has been described as of medium height,
sturdy and thick-set, with bright dark eyes, and pleasing,
rather reserved expression.
He was born in 1621, at Winestead, near Hull, in Yorkshire. His
father was master of the grammar school, and there Andrew was pre-
pared for Trinity College, Cambridge. But a boyish escapade led to
his expulsion before the completion of his university course, and for
several years he lived abroad; visiting France, Holland, Spain, and
Italy, and improving his mind (to very
good purpose, as his friend John Milton
said admiringly. He returned to become
tutor to Lord Fairfax's young daughter, and
lived at Nun Appleton near Hull. He was
an ardent lover of nature, finding rest and
refreshment in its color and beauty, noting
the lilt of a bird or the texture of a blos-
som with a happy zest which recalls the
songs of the Elizabethans. Much of his
pastoral verse was written at this period.
But his energetic nature
tired of
country calm. His connection with Lord
ANDREW MARVELL Fairfax had made him known in Round-
head circles, and he left Nun Appleton,
appointed by Cromwell tutor to his young ward Mr. Dutton, and
afterwards engaged in politics. His native Hull elected him to Par-
liament three times; and he is said to have been the last member to
receive wages — two shillings a day — for his services. So well did
he satisfy his constituents that they continued him a pension until
his death in 1678. His public career was distinguished for fearless
integrity; and an often quoted instance of this describes Lord Treas-
urer Danby sent by Charles II. to seek out the poet in his poverty-
stricken lodgings off the Strand, with enticing offers to join the court
party. These Marvell stoutly declined; although the story adds that
as soon as his flattering visitor had gone he was forced to send out
for the loan of a guinea.
Marvell's satiric prose was too bitter and too personal not to
arouse great animosity, and he was often forced to circulate it in
D

soon
-


## p. 9771 (#179) ###########################################

ANDREW MARVELL
9771
verse.
manuscript or have it secretly printed. The vigorous style suggests
Swift; and mingled with coarse invective and frequent brutalities
there is sledge-hammer force of wit, — much of which, however, is
lost to the modern reader from the fact that the issues involved are
now forgotten.
The great objects of Marvell's veneration were Cromwell and Mil-
ton. He knew them personally, was the associate of Milton at the
latter's request, and these master minds inspired some of his finest
He has been called “the poet of the Protectorate”; and per-
haps no one has spoken more eloquently upon Cromwell than he in
his Horatian Ode) and Death of Cromwell. It is interesting to
note that Milton and Cromwell admired and respected Marvell's
talents, and that the former suggested in all sincerity that he himself
might find matter for envy in the achievement of the lesser poet.
Marvell was eminently afflicted with the gift of wit or ingenuity
much prized in his time,” says Goldwin Smith. His fanciful artificial-
ities, reflecting the contemporary spirit of Waller and Cowley, are
sometimes tedious to modern taste. But in sincerer moods he could
write poems whose genuine feeling, descriptive charm, and artistic
skill are still as effective as ever.
THE GARDEN
HⓇ
ow vainly men themselves amaze,
To win the palm, the oak, or bays:
And their incessant labors see
Crowned from some single herb, or tree,
Whose short and narrow-vergèd shade
Does prudently their toils upbraid;
While all the flowers and trees do close,
To weave the garlands of repose.
Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear ?
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men.
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow;
Society is all but rude
To this delicious solitude.
No white nor red was ever seen
So amorous as this lovely green.


## p. 9772 (#180) ###########################################

9772
ANDREW MARVELL
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress's name.
Little, alas! they know or heed,
How far these beauties her exceed!
Fair trees! where'er your barks I wound,
No name shall but your own be found.
When we have run our passion's heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The gods, who mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race.
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow;
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a nymph, but for a reed.
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
Withdraws into its happiness —
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find:
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Here at the fountain's sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
Casting the body's vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There like a bird it sits and sings,
Then whets and claps its silver wings;
And till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.
Such was the happy garden state,
While man there walked without a mate;
After a place so pure and sweet,
What other help could yet be meet ?


## p. 9773 (#181) ###########################################

ANDREW MARVELL
9773
But 'twas beyond a mortal's share
To wander solitary there:
Two paradises are in one,
To live in paradise alone.
How well the skillful gardener drew
Of flowers and herbs, this dial new!
Where from above the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run;
And as it works, th' industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers ?
THE EMIGRANTS IN BERMUDAS
HERE the remote Bermudas ride
In th' ocean's bosom, unespied -
From a small boat that rowed along,
The listening winds received this song :-
WI
What should we do but sing His praise
That led us through the watery maze
Unto an isle so long unknown,
And yet far kinder than our own ?
Where he the huge sea monsters wracks
That lift the deep upon their backs,
He lands us on a grassy stage,
Safe from the storms and prelate's rage.
He gave us this eternal spring
Which here enamels everything,
And sends the fowls to us in care,
On daily visits through the air.
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pomegranates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows;
He makes the figs our mouths to meet,
And throws the melons at our feet;
But apples, — plants of such a price
No tree could ever bear them twice,-
With cedars, chosen by his hand
From Lebanon, he stores the land;
And makes the hollow seas that roar
Proclaim the ambergris on shore.


## p. 9774 (#182) ###########################################

9774
ANDREW MARVELL
He cast (of which we rather boast)
The gospel's pearl upon our coast;
And in these rocks for us did frame
A temple where to sound his name.
Oh, let our voice his praise exalt
Till it arrive at heaven's vault;
Which then, perhaps, rebounding may
Echo beyond the Mexique bay.
Thus they sang, in the English boat,
A holy and a cheerful note;
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.
THE MOWER TO THE GLOW-WORMS
Y"
E LIVING lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate!
Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor prince's funeral,
Shining unto no other end
Than to presage the grass's fall!
Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
To wandering mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray!
Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come;
For she my mind hath so displaced,
That I shall never find my home.
THE MOWER'S SONG
M
Y MIND was once the true survey
Of all these meadows fresh and gay:
And in the greenness of the grass
Did see its hopes as in a glass :
When Juliana came, and she,
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.


## p. 9775 (#183) ###########################################

ANDREW MARVELL
9775
But these, while I with sorrow pine,
Grew more luxuriant still and fine;
That not one blade of grass you spied
But had a flower on either side:
When Juliana came, and she,
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
Unthankful meadows, could you so
A fellowship so true forego,
And in your gaudy May-games meet,
While I lay trodden under feet?
When Juliana came, and she,
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
But what you in compassion ought,
Shall now by my revenge be wrought;
And flowers, and grass, and I, and all,
Will in one common ruin fall:
For Juliana comes, and she,
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
And thus ye meadows, which have been
Companions of my thoughts more green,
Shall now the heraldry become
With which I shall adorn my tomb:
For Juliana comes, and she,
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
THE PICTURE OF T. C.
IN A PROSPECT OF FLOWERS
SP
EE with what simplicity
This nymph begins her golden days!
In the green grass she loves to lie,
And there with her fair aspect tames
The wilder flowers, and gives them names;
But only with the roses plays,
And them does tell
What color best becomes them, and what smell.
Who can foretell for what high cause
This darling of the gods was born ?


## p. 9776 (#184) ###########################################

9776
ANDREW MARVELL
See! this is she whose chaster laws
The wanton Love shall one day fear,
And under her command severe,
See his bow broke and ensigns torn.
Happy who can
Appease this virtuous enemy of inan!
Oh, then let me in time compound
And parley with those conquering eyes,
Ere they have tried their force to wound,-
Ere with their glancing wheels they drive
In triumph over hearts that strive,
And them that yield but more despise:
Let me be laid
Where I may see the glory from some shade.
Meanwhile, whilst every verdant thing
Itself does at thy beauty charm,
Reform the errors of the spring:
Make that the tulips may have share
Of sweetness, seeing they are fair;
And roses of their thorns disarm;
But most procure
That violets may a longer age endure.
But oh, young beauty of the woods,
Whom Nature courts with fruit and flowers,
Gather the flowers, but spare the buds,
Lest Flora, angry at thy crime
To kill her infants in their prime,
Should quickly make the example yours;
And ere we see,
Nip in the blossom all our hopes in thee.


## p. 9777 (#185) ###########################################

9777
MASQUES
BY ERNEST RHYS
ome of the prettiest things in all literature lie hidden and
half forgotten in the “masques” and “triumphs” to be found
in the old quartos and dusty folios of the early seventeenth
century. Lord Bacon unbent to praise them; Milton and Ben Jonson
wrote them; Campion used both his music and his poetry upon them;
Inigo Jones lent them his art. These are famous names, and in a
brief account one must keep to the great craftsmen who worked in
that way; but it is fair to remember too the number of less known
writers who left things of the kind, imperfect as whole performances,
but full of such effects and pleasant passages as well reward the
students and lovers of old poetry.
Among the poets who have not come popularly into the first or
second rank, Samuel Daniel — «the well-languaged Daniel,” as he has
been called — has written exquisitely parts and passages in this kind.
Daniel, it may be recalled, besides writing plays on a classical Senecan
model, very remarkable and exceptional in the literature of the time,
wrote a very convincing retort in his Defence of Rhyme) to Cam-
pion's attack on its use in English poetry. The prose Defence had
its verse counterpart in Musophilus); in whose terse lines may be
found some that may grow proverbial, as e. g. :-
«While timorous knowledge stands considering,
Audacious ignorance hath done the deed. ”
Something of the same idiomatic force of expression may be found
in his masques and in his plays. In his masque of 'Tethys's Festival,
or the Queen's Wake,' which was celebrated at Whitehall in 1610, and
which like so many of Ben Jonson's masques owed a moiety at least
of their effect to the genius of Inigo Jones, -as becomes a play
devoted to Tethys, Queen of Ocean, and her nymphs, we find that
« The Scene it selfe was a Port or Haven, with Bulworkes at the entrance,
and the figure of a Castle commaunding a fortified towne: within this Port were
many Ships, small and great, seeming to lie at anchor, some neerer, and some
further off, according to perspective: beyond all appeared the Horizon or ter-
mination of the Sea, which seemed to moove with a gentle gale, and many
Sayles lying, some to come into the Port, and others passing out. From this
Scene issued Zephyrus, with eight Naydes, Nymphs of fountaines, and two
Tritons sent from Tethys. ”
XVII-612


## p. 9778 (#186) ###########################################

9778
MASQUES
Then followed songs and dances, and a change of scene accom-
plished during a wonderful circular dance of mirrors and lights,
devised by Inigo Jones.
“After this, Tethys rises, and with her Nymphes performes her second
daunce, and then reposes her againe upon the Mount, entertained with another
song:-
“Are they shadowes that we see ?
And can shadowes pleasure give?
Pleasures onely shadowes bee
Cast by bodies we conceive;
And are made the things we deeme,
In those figures which they seeme.
“But these pleasures vanish fast,
Which by shadowes are exprest:
Pleasures are not, if they last;
In their passing is their best.
Glory is most bright and gay
In a flash, and so away. ”
Another poet and playwright of a distinctly lower rank than Dan-
iel, and yet a better writer perhaps than we now usually deem him,
- Sir William Davenant, - also wrote masques in conjunction with
Inigo Jones. Whether it was that Inigo had a good and inspiring
influence on the Oxford vintner's son, whom old report has associated
now and again with Shakespeare himself, certainly Davenant is found
quite at his most interesting pitch in such masques as “The Temple
of Love,' written some twenty-four years after Daniel's "Tethys's
Festival,' and presented by the “Queenes Majesty and her Ladies at
Whitehall, on Shrove Tuesday 1634. " The Queen was Henrietta
Maria, wife of Charles I. There is a certain quaintness in the concep-
tion of this masque, in which «Divine Poesie,” who is called “the
Secretary of Nature in the Argument, plays a prominent part. She
appears in the masque itself as “a beautiful woman, her garment
sky-color, set all with stars of gold, her head crowned with laurel, a
spangled veil hanging down behind,” a swan at her side, attended by
the Greek poets. For high-priest she has Orpheus, who is seen most
picturesquely in the following scene:-
>>>
«Out of a Creeke came waving forth a Barque of a gracious Antique de-
signe, adorned with Sculpture finishing in Scrowles, that on the poope had for
Ornament a great Masque head of a Sea-god; and all the rest enriched with
embost worke touched with silver and gold. In the midst of this Barque sate
Orpheus with his Harpe; he wore a white robe girt, on his shoulders was a
mantle of carnation, and his head crowned with a laurell garland; with him,
other persons in habits of Sea-men as pilots and guiders of the Barque; he
playing one straine was answered with the voyces and instruments.


## p. 9779 (#187) ###########################################

MASQUES
9779
THE SONG
HEARKE! Orpheus is a Sea-man growne;
No winds of late have rudely blowne,
Nor waves their troubled heads advance!
His Harpe hath made the winds so mild,
They whisper now as reconciled;
The waves are soothed into a dance. )
Obviously much of the picturesqueness of such scenes was due to
the fine art of Inigo Jones. But we have to remember that music too
was an essential part; and this brings us to the conclusion that in
the masque, the arts all meet and combine in close accord. Paint-
ing and poetry, music and dancing, — nay, even architecture and
sculpture, have their allotted uses in it. For, to take sculpture, not
only does the devising and posing of the masquers and their draper-
ies seem as much a sculptor's as a painter's prerogative, but in the
old masques the device of living statues was a common one. Take
for example the Masque of the Gentlemen of Gray's Inn,' by Fran-
cis Beaumont:-
.
«The statues were attired in cases of gold and silver close to their bodies,
faces, hands, and feet, - nothing seen but gold and silver, as if they had been
solid images of metal; tresses of hair,
girdles and small aprons of
oaken leaves, as if they had been carved or molded out of the metal. At
their coming, the music changed from violins to hautboys, cornets, etc. ; and
the air of the music was utterly turned into a soft time, with drawing notes,
excellently expressing their natures, . and the statues placed in such
several postures · as was very graceful, besides the novelty. ”
This is enough to give an idea of the charm, in daintily mingled
effects of color and music, which exists in this realm of masques and
pageants; which is wide enough to include such pure poetry as Mil-
ton's Comus,' and such splendid scenes of State as the field of the
Cloth of Gold. A pleasant realm to wander in, which leaves one
haunted indeed by such sights and sounds as those of the Dance of
the Stars, so frequently introduced, and the song that attended its
progress :-
«Shake off your heavy trance,
And leap into a dance,
Such as no mortals use to tread;
Fit only for Apollo
To play to, for the moon to lead,
And all the stars to follow. )
Ernen Rhus
thus


## p. 9780 (#188) ###########################################

9780
JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
(1663–1742)
BY J. F. BINGHAM
HE subject of this sketch, the celebrated Bishop of Clermont,
was the last of the three greatest preachers of the great
age of pulpit eloquence in France — the age, as Voltaire
has observed, probably the greatest in pulpit oratory of all time.
Massillon, by the consensus of the world, has been adjudged the
greatest of the great three, in the region of the pathetic, or persua-
sion by the resource of emotion, or in still
other words, as a preacher; that is, in the
power of stirring the hearts and moving
the passions of multitudes of men towards
that which all men know to be the noblest
and best, whatever the practice of their
lives may be.
Bossuet, the monarch of the pulpit,
moved on with a magnificent and thunder-
ing tread, trampling down all opposition;
in a dignified and elegant fury, subduing
all things to his imperial will. Bourdaloue,
the Jesuit and incomparable logician, a com-
J. B. MASSILLON batant by far more skillful than even Bos-
suet, with no flourish of trumpets, brought
up the irresistible battalions of arguments, marshaled with matchless
skill, swiftly succeeding one another with an unerring aim, all in
fighting undress, without waving plumes or the clank of glittering
trappings or the frippery of gilded lace and pompous orders, but with
victory written on every banner; and when the hour of conflict was
over, stood on a field strewed with the wrecks of every adversary.
Massillon, coming immediately after these giants of a world-wide
renown, while yet the air was ringing of their hitherto unequaled
achievements, - with the great advantage, indeed, of being offered
the opportunity of learning much from their skill, - yet struck out
a wholly new method for himself. Each of the three evinced enor-
mous native oratorical talent. Each had acquired and mastered what-
ever the schools can furnish of rhetorical skill and finish; and this is
much. But Massillon evinced an enormous superiority in that which



## p. 9781 (#189) ###########################################

JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
9781
was a peculiarity of his own and it was a peculiarity of measure-
less consequence. He evinced a moral constitution more subtle and
more refined than either; a knowledge of the secret depths of the
human heart more profound; and a certain sympathetic power, inde-
scribable in words, but infinitely effective in stirring the emotions and
rousing the passions of the hearer into an irresistible conflict in his
soul with his own perverse inclinations: while at the same moment
he was enchanting him with the purest and most perfect graces of
style; and was sweetly, almost unconsciously, leading him along, not
able, not wishing, to resist; or even affrighting him by a sudden cry
of alarm, as sincere and tender as that of a mother frightening her
infant away from the wrong way into the right.
In respect of purity and beauty of style, Fénelon, and Fénelon alone
of all preachers, might come into competition with him; but Fénelon
having ordered his sermons to be burned, we have little or nothing
of his in this line.
It is a happy consequence of this extreme elegance, this match-
less purity and beauty of style,- and it is one of the rarest in the
world, in the case of the great preachers, — that after deducting the
necessary and unspeakable loss of his majestic presence, his impress-
ive manner, his wonderfully lovely voice, his perfect and bewitch-
ing elocution, his printed sermons were read by the most refined of
his contemporaries in the closet, and for nearly two hundred years
have been and are still read (in the original), with unabated delight.
The young King Louis XV. , we are told, “learned them by heart,
the magistrate had them in his office, the fine lady on her toilet
table. Unfortunately there are not, perhaps there cannot be, any
translation of his masterpieces which in respect of style would be
judged, by those most competent to judge, to be worthy of him.
From the smoothness and harmonious flow of his sentences, Voltaire
named him the Racine of the pulpit; and tells us that the Athalie)
of Racine and the Grand Carême' of Massillon (the forty-two ser-
mons preached at Versailles before Louis XIV. during the Lent of
1704) are always lying on his table side by side.
This remarkable man was the son of a minor officer of the law;
born in the little city of Hyères, — an ancient watering-place on the
French Riviera, some fifty miles east of Marseilles,- and educated
at the College of the Oratorians at Marseilles, of which liberal
order he became in due time a priest. He was a true child of the
fervid south. The warm blood of Provence galloped through his
veins, and the hot passions of human nature were strong in his soul.
His infant rambles were among orange groves, olives, and palms.
The soft breezes of the Mediterranean fanned the cheeks of his
youth; and from infancy up his ears were daily saluted by the gay


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JEAN BAPTISTE MASSILLON
and amorous melodies of the Troubadours. He was rusticated from
his college for some faux pas with the sex. It was nothing very
serious, we imagine (he was only eighteen), and he was restored to
his classes within the year. After his great sermon on the Prodigal
Son, in which he so profoundly analyzes the workings of the volup-
tuous passions, he was asked “where, being a recluse, he could have
obtained such a profound knowledge of the voluptuous life? ” He
replied, “In my own heart. ”
He was not only born in the land of love and song, he was born
an orator. It is related of him that in early childhood he was ac-
customed, on Sundays and holy days, to gather his comrades around
him, then mount a rock, a box, or a chair, and declaim to them the
substance of the sermon he had heard at mass. In college he pur-
sued the humanities with the greatest zeal, and was greatly distin-
guished in all the rhetorical exercises; yet after becoming a priest
and furnished with such a magnificent equipment, he grew shy of
this great talent, made repeated attempts to escape the pulpit, and
finally began the exercise of his remarkable gifts only on the abso-
lute command of the superior of his order. From the first moment
a brilliant career was assured. Success swiftly followed success. He
passed rapidly up the ladder of promotion. The great capital was
already whispering his fame, when in his thirty-third year he found
himself actually planted in that wicked Babylon, and summoned to
preach in its most prominent pulpits. Improving his opportunity to
hear the greatest preachers there (including of course Bossuet and
Bourdaloue, and probably Fléchier and Mascaron), he said on
occasion to a brother priest who accompanied him: "I feel their
intellectual force, I recognize their great talents; but if I preach, I
shall not preach like them. ” And surely he did not.
From this moment, to hear a sermon of Massillon was a new expe-
rience to Paris. Many stories have come down to us of the effects
of this new method in the hands of this unparalleled master. We can
cite but a specimen.