Travelers
through the Genesee valley tell
us they could find no man who had not in this way changed
his abode at least six
times.
us they could find no man who had not in this way changed
his abode at least six
times.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v16 - Lev to Mai
Babby never could refuse charity to the needy,
and Jock was sure of receiving something from her as the result
## p. 9498 (#526) ###########################################
9498
NORMAN MACLEOD
of his weekly calls; but he never consigned a scrap of meat to
his wallet without a preliminary battle. On the evening of the
commemoration of the "Melampus" engagement, Babby was sit-
ting by the fire watching a fowl which twirled from the string
roasting for supper, and which dropped its unctuous lard on a
number of potatoes that lay basking in the tin receiver below.
A loud rap was heard at the back door; and to the question,
"Who's there? " the reply was heard of "Babbity, open! Open,
wee Babbity! Hee, hee, hee! "
"Gae wa wi' ye, ye daft cratur," said Babby.
"What right
hae ye to disturb folk at this time o' nicht? I'll let loose the
dog on you. "
Babby knew that Skye shared her dislike to Jock; as was
evident from his bark when he rose, and with curled tail began
snuffing at the foot of the door. Another knock, louder than
before, made Babby start.
"My word," she exclaimed, "but ye hae learned impudence! "
And afraid of disturbing "the company," she opened as much of
the door as enabled her to see and rebuke Jock.
"Hoo daur ye,
Jock, to rap sae loud as that? »
"Open, wee, wee, wee Babbity! " said Jock.
"Ye big, big, big blackguard, I'll dae naething o' the kind,"
said Babby as she shut the door. But the stick of the fool was
suddenly interposed. "That beats a'! " said Babby: "what the
sorrow d'ye want, Jock, to daur to presume — »
But to Babby's horror the door was forced open in the mid-
dle of her threat, and the fool entered, exclaiming, "I want a
kiss, my wee, wee, bonnie Babbity! "
"Preserve us a'! " exclaimed Babby, questioning whether she
should scream or fly, while the fool, turning his back to the
light, seized her by both her wrists, and imprinted a kiss on her
forehead.
"Skye! " half screamed Babby; but Skye was springing up,
as if anxious to kiss Jock. Babby fell back on a chair, and
catching a glimpse of the fool's face, she exclaimed, "O my
darling, my darling! O Neddy, Neddy, Neddy! " Flinging off
her cap, as she always did on occasions of great perplexity, she
seized him by the hands, and then sunk back, almost fainting, in
the chair.
"Silence, dear Babby! " said Ned, speaking in a whisper; "for
I want to astonish the old couple. How glad I am to see you!
## p. 9499 (#527) ###########################################
NORMAN MACLEOD
9499
Then
and they are all well, I know; and Freeman here, too! "
seizing the dog, he clasped him to his heart, while the brute
struggled with many an eager cry to kiss his old master's face.
Ned's impulse from the first was to rush into the parlor; but
he was restrained by that strange desire which all have experi-
enced in the immediate anticipation of some great joy,-to hold
it from us, as a parent does a child, before we seize it and clasp
it to our breast.
The small party, consisting of the captain, his wife, and Free-
man, were sitting round the parlor fire; Mrs. Fleming sewing,
and the others keeping up rather a dull conversation, as those
who felt, though they did not acknowledge, the presence of some-
thing at their hearts which hindered their usual freedom and
genial hilarity.
"Supper should be ready by this time," suggested the captain,
just as the scene between Ned and Babby was taking place in
the kitchen. "Babby and Skye seem busy: I shall ring, may I
not ? »
"If you please," said Mrs. Fleming; "but depend upon it,
Babby will cause no unnecessary delays. "
Babby speedily responded to the captain's ring. On entering
the room she burst into a fit of laughing. Mrs. Fleming put
down her work and looked at her servant as if she was mad.
"What do you mean, woman? " asked the captain with knit
brows: "I never saw you behave so before. "
"Maybe no. Ha! ha! ha! " said Babby; "but there's a queer
man wishing to speak wi' ye. " At this moment a violent ring
was heard from the door-bell.
-―― -
"A queer man-wishing to speak with me at this hour,"
muttered the captain, as if in utter perplexity.
Babby had retired to the lobby, and was ensconced, with her
apron in her mouth, in a corner near the kitchen. "You had
better open the door yersel'," cried Babby, smothering her laugh-
ter.
The captain, more puzzled than ever, went to the door, and
opening it was saluted with a gruff voice, saying, "I'm a poor
sailor, sir,—and knows you're an old salt, and have come to
see you, sir. "
"See me, sir! What do you want? " replied the captain
gruffly, as one whose kindness some impostor hoped to bene-
fit by.
-
## p. 9500 (#528) ###########################################
9500
NORMAN MACLEOD
"Wants nothing, sir," said the sailor, stepping near the captain.
A half-scream, half-laugh from Babby drew Mrs. Fleming and
Freeman to the lobby.
"You want nothing? What brings you to disturb me at this
hour of the night? Keep back, sir! ”
"Well, sir, seeing as how I sailed with Old Cairney, I thought
you would not refuse me a favor," replied the sailor in a hoarse
voice.
"Don't dare, sir," said the captain, "to come into my house
one step farther, till I know more about you. "
"Now, captain, don't be angry; you know as how that great
man Nelson expected every man to do his duty: all I want is
just to shake Mrs. Fleming by the hand, and then I go; that is,
if after that you want me for to go. "
"Mrs. Fleming! " exclaimed the captain, with the indignation
of a man who feels that the time has come for open war as
against a house-breaker. "If you dare — »
But Mrs. Fleming, seeing the rising storm, passed her husband
rapidly, and said to the supposed intruder, whom she assumed to
be a tipsy sailor, "There is my hand, if that's all you want: go
away now as you said, and don't breed any disturbance. "
But the sailor threw his arms around his mother, and Babby
rushed forward with a light; and then followed muffled cries
of "Mother! " "Father! " "Ned! " "My own boy! " "God be
praised! " until the lobby was emptied, and the parlor once more
alive with as joyous and thankful hearts as ever met in "hamlet
or in baron's ha'! "
HIGHLAND SCENERY
HER
ER great delight was in the scenery of that West Highland
country. Italy has its gorgeous beauty, and is a magnifi-
cent volume of poetry history, and art, superb within and
without, read by the light of golden sunsets. Switzerland is the
most perfect combination of beauty and grandeur; from its up-
lands with grass more green and closely shaven than an English
park; umbrageous with orchards; musical with rivulets; tinkling
with the bells of wandering cattle and flocks of goats; social with
picturesque villages gathered round the chapel spires-up to the
bare rocks and mighty cataracts of ice; until the eye rests on the
## p. 9501 (#529) ###########################################
NORMAN MACLEOD
9501
peaks of alabaster snow, clear and sharp in the intense blue of
the cloudless sky, which crown the whole marvelous picture with
awful grandeur! Norway too has its peculiar glory of fiords
worming their way like black water-snakes among gigantic mount-
ains, lofty precipices, or primeval forests. But the scenery of the
Western Highlands has a distinctive character of its own. It is
not beauty, in spite of its knolls of birch and oak copse that
fringe the mountain lochs and the innumerable bights and bays
of pearly sand. Nor is it grandeur — although there is a wonder-
ful vastness in its far-stretching landscapes of ocean meeting the
horizon, or of hills beyond hills, in endless ridges, mingling afar
with the upper sky. But in the sombre coloring of its mount-
ains; in the silence of its untrodden valleys; in the extent of its
bleak and undulating moors; in the sweep of its rocky corries;
in the shifting mists and clouds that hang over its dark preci-
pices: in all this kind of scenery, along with the wild traditions
which ghost-like float around its ancient keeps, and live in the
tales of its inhabitants, there is a glory and a sadness, most affect-
ing to the imagination, and suggestive of a period of romance
and song, of clanships and of feudal attachments, which, banished
from the rest of Europe, took refuge and lingered long in those
rocky fastnesses, before they "passed away forever on their dun
wings from Morven. "
Μ'
MY LITTLE MAY
Y LITTLE May was like a lintie
Glintin' 'mang the flowers o' spring;
Like a lintie she was cantie,
Like a lintie she could sing;-
Singing, milking in the gloamin',
Singing, herding in the morn,
Singing 'mang the brackens roaming,
Singing shearing yellow corn!
Oh the bonnie dell and dingle,
Oh the bonnie flowering glen,
Oh the bonnie bleezin' ingle,
Oh the bonnie but and ben!
Ilka body smiled that met her,
Nane were glad that said fareweel:
## p. 9502 (#530) ###########################################
9502
NORMAN MACLEOD
Never was a blyther, better,
Bonnier bairn, frae croon to heel!
Oh the bonnie dell and dingle,
Oh the bonnie flowering glen,
Oh the bonnie bleezin' ingle,
Oh the bonnie but and ben!
Blaw, wintry winds, blaw cauld and eerie,
Drive the sleet and drift the snaw:
May is sleeping, she was weary,
For her heart was broke in twa!
Oh wae the dell and dingle,
Oh wae the flowering glen;
Oh wae aboot the ingle,
Wae's me baith but and ben'
## p. 9503 (#531) ###########################################
9503
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
(1852-)
HE change in aim and method of the modern historian has
kept pace with the development of the democratic idea.
Where before, in the study and writing of history, the do-
ings of rulers and courts and the working of governmental machinery
have been the chief points of interest, to the exclusion of the every-
day deeds and needs of the nation, the tendency to-day is to lay
emphasis on the life of the people broadly viewed, -the development
of the social organism in all its parts. The feeling behind this
tendency is based on a conviction that the
true vitality of a country depends upon the
healthy growth and general welfare of the
great mass of plain folk,-the working,
struggling, wealth-producing people who
make it up.
The modern historian, in a
word, makes man in the State, irrespective
of class or position, his subject for sympa-
thetic portrayal.
This type of historian is represented by
John Bach McMaster, whose 'History of
the People of the United States' strives to
give a picture of social rather than consti-
tutional and political growth: those phases JOHN BACH MCMASTER
of American history have been treated ably
by Adams, Schouler, and others. Professor McMaster, with admirable
lucidity and simplicity of style, and always with an appeal to fact
precluding the danger of the subjective writing of history to fit a
theory, tells this vital story of the national evolution, and tells it as
it has not been told before. The very title of his work defines its
purpose. It is a history not of the United States, but of the people
of the United States,-like Green's great 'History of the English
People,' another work having the same ideal, the modern attitude.
The period covered in Professor McMaster's plan is that reaching
from the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 to the outbreak of the
Civil War,-less than one hundred years, but a crucial time for
the shaping of the country. The depiction of the formative time,
the day of the pioneer and the settler,- of the crude beginnings of
## p. 9504 (#532) ###########################################
9504
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
civilization, engages his particular attention and receives his most
careful treatment. An example is given in the selection chosen from
his work, which gains warmth and picturesqueness in this way. The
first volume of his work appeared in 1883; the fourth (bringing the
account down to 1821) in 1895. Several volumes must be forthcom-
ing to complete the study. Professor McMaster has allowed himself
space and leisure in order to make an exhaustive survey of the field,
and a synthetic presentation of the material. His history when fin-
ished will be of very great value. His preparation for it began in
1870, when he was a young student, and it will be his life work and
monument.
-
John Bach McMaster was born in Brooklyn, June 29th, 1852; and
received his education at the College of the City of New York, his
graduation year being 1872. He taught a little, studied civil engi-
neering, and in 1877 became instructor in that branch at Princeton.
Thence he was called in 1883 to the University of Pennsylvania, to
take the chair of American history, which he still holds. Professor
McMaster is also an attractive essayist. His 'Benjamin Franklin as
a Man of Letters' (1887) is an excellent piece of biography; and
the volume of papers called 'With the Fathers' (1896) contains a
series of historical portraits sound in scholarship and very readable
in manner. In his insistence on the presenting of the unadorned
truth, his dislike of pseudo-hero worship, Professor McMaster seems at
times iconoclastic. But while he is not entirely free from prejudice,
his intention is to give no false lights to the picture, and few his-
torians have been broader minded and fairer.
TOWN AND COUNTRY LIFE IN 1800
From 'A History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to
the Civil War. D. Appleton & Co. , 1885. Copyright 1885, by John Bach
McMaster.
WHAT
HAT was then known as the far West was Kentucky, Ohio,
and central New York. Into it the emigrants came
streaming along either of two routes. Men from New
England took the most northern, and went out by Albany and
Troy to the great wilderness which lay along the Mohawk and
the lakes. They came by tens of thousands from farms and vil-
lages, and represented every trade, every occupation, every walk
in life, save one: none were seafarers. No whaler left his vessel;
no seaman deserted his mess; no fisherman of Marblehead or
Gloucester exchanged the dangers of a life on the ocean for the
## p. 9505 (#533) ###########################################
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
9505
privations of a life in the West. Their fathers and their uncles
had been fishermen before them, and their sons were to follow
in their steps. Long before a lad could nib a quill, or make a
pot-hook, or read half the precepts his primer contained, he knew
the name of every brace and stay, every sail and part of a Grand
Banker and a Chebacco, all the nautical terms, what line and
hook should be used for catching halibut and what for mackerel
and cod. If he ever learned to write, he did so at "writing-
school," which, like singing-school, was held at night, and to
which he came bringing his own dipped candle, his own paper,
and his own pen. The candlestick was a scooped-out turnip, or
a piece of board with a nail driven through it. His paper he
ruled with a piece of lead, for the graphite lead-pencil was un-
known. All he knew of theology, and much of his knowledge of
reading and spelling, was gained with the help of the New Eng-
land Primer. There is not, and there never was, a text-book so
richly deserving a history as the Primer. The earliest mention
of it in print now known is to be found in an almanac for the
year 1691. The public are there informed that a second impres-
sion is "in press, and will suddenly be extant"; and will con-
tain, among much else that is new, the verses John Rogers the
Martyr made and left as a legacy to his children. When the
second impression became extant, a rude cut of Rogers lashed to
the stake, and while the flames burned fiercely, discoursing to his
wife and nine small children, embellished the verses, as it has
done in every one of the innumerable editions since struck off.
The tone of the Primer is deeply religious. Two thirds of the
four-and-twenty pictures placed before the couplets and triplets
in rhyme, from
to
"In Adam's fall
We sinnèd all,"
"Zaccheus, he
Did climb a tree
Our Lord to see,"
represent Biblical incidents. Twelve "words of six syllables" are
given in the spelling lesson. Five of them are-abomination, edi-
fication, humiliation, mortification, purification. More than half
the book is made up of the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, some
of Watts's hymns, and the whole of that great Catechism which
one hundred and twenty divines spent five years in preparing.
XVI-595
## p. 9506 (#534) ###########################################
9506
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
There too are Mr. Rogers's verses, and John Cotton's 'Spiritual
Milk for American Babes'; exhortations not to cheat at play,
not to lie, not to use ill words, not to call ill names, not to be a
dunce, and to love school. The Primer ends with the famous
dialogue between Christ, Youth, and the Devil.
Moved by pity and a wish to make smooth the rough path to
learning, some kind soul prepared 'A Lottery-Book for Children. '
The only difficulty in teaching children to read was, he thought,
the difficulty of keeping their minds from roaming; and to "pre-
vent this precipitancy" was the object of the 'Lottery-Book. ' On
one side of each leaf was a letter of the alphabet; on the other
two pictures. As soon, he explained, as the child could speak, it
should thrust a pin through the leaf from the side whereon the
pictures were, at the letter on the other, and should continue to
do this till at last the letter was pierced. Turning the leaf after
each trial, the mind of the child would be fixed so often and so
long on the letter that it would ever after be remembered.
The illustrations in the book are beneath those of a patent-
medicine almanac, but are quite as good as any that can be found
in children's books of that day. No child had then ever seen
such specimens of the wood-engraver's and the printer's and the
binder's arts as now, at the approach of every Christmas, issue
from hundreds of presses. The covers of such chap-books were
bits of wood, and the backs coarse leather. On the covers was
sometimes a common blue paper, and sometimes a hideous wall-
paper, adorned with horses and dogs, roosters and eagles, standing
in marvelous attitudes on gilt or copper scrolls. The letterpress
of none
was specially illustrated, but the same cut was used
again and again to express the most opposite ideas. A woman
with a dog holding her train is now Vanity, and now Miss All-
worthy going abroad to buy books for her brother and sister.
A huge vessel with three masts is now a yacht, and now the
ship in which Robinson Crusoe sailed from Hull. The virtuous
woman that is a crown to her husband, and naughty Miss Kitty
Bland, are one and the same. Master Friendly listening to the
minister at church now heads a catechism, and now figures as
Tommy Careless in the 'Adventures of a Week. ' A man and
woman feeding beggars become, in time, transformed into a
servant introducing two misers to his mistress. But no creature
played so many parts as a bird, which after being named an
eagle, a cuckoo, and a kite, is called finally Noah's dove.
## p. 9507 (#535) ###########################################
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
9507
Mean and cheap as such chap-books were, the peddler who
hawked them sold not one to the good wives of a fishing village.
The women had not the money to buy with; the boys had not
the disposition to read. Till he was nine, a lad did little more
than watch the men pitch pennies in the road, listen to sea
stories, and hurry, at the cry of "Rock him," "Squail him," to
help his playmates pelt with stones some unoffending boy from a
neighboring village. By the time he had seen his tenth birth-
day he was old enough not to be seasick, not to cry during a
storm at sea, and to be of some use about a ship; and went on
his first trip to the Banks. The skipper and the crew called him
"cut-tail"; for he received no money save for the fish he caught,
and each one he caught was marked by snipping a piece from
the tail. After an apprenticeship of three or four years the
"cut-tail" became a "header," stood upon the same footing as
the «< sharesmen," and learned all the duties which a
"splitter"
and a «< salter" must perform. A crew numbered eight; four were
"sharesmen" and four were apprentices; went twice a year to
the Banks, and stayed each time from three to five months.
Men who had passed through such a training were under no
temptation to travel westward. They took no interest, they bore
no part in the great exodus. They still continued to make their
trips and bring home their "fares"; while hosts of New-England-
ers poured into New York, opening the valleys, founding cities,
and turning struggling hamlets into villages of no mean kind.
Catskill, in 1792, numbered ten dwellings and owned one vessel
of sixty tons. In 1800 there were in the place one hundred
and fifty-six houses, two ships, a schooner, and eight sloops of
one hundred tons each, all owned there and employed in carry-
ing produce to New York. Six hundred and twenty-four bushels
of wheat were brought to the Catskill market in 1792. Forty-
six thousand one hundred and sixty-four bushels came in 1800.
On a single day in 1801 the merchants bought four thousand
one hundred and eight bushels of wheat, and the same day
eight hundred loaded sleighs came into the village by the west-
ern road. In 1790 a fringe of clearings ran along the western
shore of Lake Champlain to the northern border, and pushed
out through the broad valley between the Adirondacks and the
Catskills to Seneca and Cayuga Lakes. In 1800 the Adirondack
region was wholly surrounded. The emigrants had passed Oneida
Lake, had passed Oswego, and skirting the shores of Ontario
## p. 9508 (#536) ###########################################
9508
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
and the banks of the St. Lawrence, had joined with those on
Lake Champlain. Some had gone down the valleys of the
Delaware and Susquehanna to the southern border of the State.
The front of emigration was far beyond Elmira and Bath. Just
before it went the speculators, the land-jobbers, the men afflicted
with what in derision was called "terraphobia. " They formed
companies and bought millions of acres. They went singly and
purchased whole townships as fast as the surveyors could locate;
buying on trust and selling for wheat, for lumber, for whatever
the land could yield or the settler give. Nor was the pioneer
less infatuated. An irresistible longing drove him westward, and
still westward, till some Indian scalped him, or till hunger, want,
bad food, and exposure broke him down, and the dreaded Genesee
fever swept him away. The moment such a man had built a
log cabin, cleared an acre, girdled the trees, and sowed a hand-
ful of grain, he was impatient to be once more moving. He had
no peace till his little farm was sold, and he had plunged into
the forest to seek a new and temporary home. The purchaser
in time would make a few improvements, clear a few more acres,
plant a little more grain, and then in turn sell and hurry west-
ward. After him came the founders of villages and towns, who,
when the cabins about them numbered ten, felt crowded and
likewise moved away.
Travelers through the Genesee valley tell
us they could find no man who had not in this way changed
his abode at least six
times. The hardships which these people
endured is beyond description. Their poverty was extreme.
Nothing was so scarce as food; many a wayfarer was turned
from their doors with the solemn assurance that they had not
enough for themselves. The only window in many a cabin was
a hole in the roof for the smoke to pass through. In the win-
ter the snow beat through the chinks and sifted under the door,
till it was heaped up about the sleepers on the floor before the
fire.
Beyond the Blue Ridge everything was most primitive. Half
the roads were " traces
» and blazed. More than half the houses,
even in the settlements, were log cabins. When a stranger came
to such a place to stay, the men built him a cabin and made
the building an occasion for sport. The trees felled, four corner-
men were elected to notch the logs; and while they were busy
the others ran races, wrestled, played leap-frog, kicked the hat,
fought, gouged, gambled, drank, did everything then considered
## p. 9509 (#537) ###########################################
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
9509
After the notching was finished the raising took
Many a time the cabin was built, roofed, the
door and window cut out, and the owner moved in, before sun-
down. The chinks were stopped with chips and smeared with
mud. The chimney was of logs, coated with mud six inches
thick. The table and the benches, the bedstead and the door,
were such as could be made with an axe, an auger, and a saw.
A rest for the rifle and some pegs for clothes completed the
fittings.
an amusement.
but a few hours.
The clothing of a man was in summer a wool hat, a blue
linsey hunting-shirt with a cape, a belt with a gayly colored
fringe, deerskin or linsey pantaloons, and moccasins and shoe-
packs of tanned leather. Fur hats were not common. A boot
was rarely to be seen. In winter, a striped linsey vest and a
white blanket coat were added. If the coat had buttons- and it
seldom had-they were made by covering slices of a cork with
bits of blanket. Food which he did not obtain by his rifle and
his traps he purchased by barter. Corn was the staple; and no
mills being near, it was pounded between two stones or rubbed
on a grater. Pork cost him twelve cents a pound, and salt
four. Dry fish was a luxury, and brought twenty cents a pound.
Sugar was often as high as forty. When he went to a settle-
ment he spent his time at the billiard-table, or in the "keg
grocery" playing Loo or "Finger in Danger," to determine who
should pay for the whisky consumed. Pious men were terrified
at the drunkenness, the vice, the gambling, the brutal fights,
the gouging, the needless duels they beheld on every hand.
Already the Kentucky boatmen had become more dreaded than
the Indians. "A Kentuc" in 1800 had much the same meaning
that a cowboy" has now. He was the most reckless, fearless,
law-despising of men. A common description of him was half
horse, half alligator, tipped with snapping-turtle.
On a sudden this community, which the preachers had often
called Satan's stronghold, underwent a moral awakening such as
this world had never beheld.
Two young men began the great work in the summer of 1799.
They were brothers, preachers, and on their way across the
pine barrens to Ohio, but turned aside to be present at a sacra-
mental solemnity on Red River. The people were accustomed
to gather at such times on a Friday, and by praying, singing,
and hearing sermons, prepare themselves for the reception of the
## p. 9510 (#538) ###########################################
9510
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
sacrament on Sunday. At the Red River meeting the brothers
were asked to preach, and one did so with astonishing fervor.
As he spoke, the people were deeply moved; tears ran streaming
down their faces, and one, a woman far in the rear of the house,
broke through order and began to shout. For two hours after
the regular preachers had gone, the crowd lingered and were
loath to depart. While they tarried, one of the brothers was
irresistibly impelled to speak. He rose and told them that he
felt called to preach, that he could not be silent. The words
which then fell from his lips roused the people before him "to a
pungent sense of sin. " Again and again the woman shouted,
and would not be silent. He started to go to her. The crowd
begged him to turn back. Something within him urged him on,
and he went through the house shouting and exhorting and
praising God. In a moment the floor, to use his own words,
«< was covered with the slain. " Their cries for mercy were
terrible to hear. Some found forgiveness, but many went away
"spiritually wounded" and suffering unutterable agony of soul.
Nothing could allay the excitement. Every settlement along the
Green River and the Cumberland was full of religious fervor.
Men fitted their wagons with beds and provisions, and traveled
fifty miles to camp upon the ground and hear him preach.
The idea was new; hundreds adopted it, and camp-meetings
began. There was now no longer any excuse to stay away
from preaching. Neither distance, nor lack of houses, nor scar-
city of food, nor daily occupations prevailed. Led by curiosity,
by excitement, by religious zeal, families of every Protestant
denomination — Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians
-hurried to the camp-ground. Crops were left half gathered;
every kind of work was left undone; cabins were deserted; in
large settlements there did not remain one soul. The first
regular general camp-meeting was held at the Gasper River
Church, in July, 1800; but the rage spread, and a dozen encamp-
ments followed in quick succession. Camp-meeting was always
in the forest near some little church, which served as the preach-
ers' lodge. At one end of a clearing was a rude stage, and
before it the stumps and trunks of hewn trees, on which the
listeners sat. About the clearing were the tents and wagons
ranged in rows like streets. The praying, the preaching, the
exhorting would sometimes last for seven days, and be prolonged
every day until darkness had begun to give way to light. Nor
-
## p. 9511 (#539) ###########################################
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
9511
were the ministers the only exhorters. Men and women, nay,
even children took part. At Cane Ridge a little girl of seven
sat upon the shoulder of a man and preached to the multitude
till she sank exhausted on her bearer's head. At Indian Creek a
lad of twelve mounted a stump and exhorted till he grew weak,
whereupon two men upheld him, and he continued till speech
was impossible. A score of sinners fell prostrate before him.
At no time was the "falling exercise" so prevalent as at night.
Nothing was then wanting that could strike terror into minds
weak, timid, and harassed. The red glare of the camp-fires re-
flected from hundreds of tents and wagons; the dense blackness
of the flickering shadows, the darkness of the surrounding forest,
made still more terrible by the groans and screams of the "spir-
itually wounded," who had fled to it for comfort; the entreaty
of the preachers; the sobs and shrieks of the downcast still walk-
ing through the dark valley of the Shadow of Death; the shouts
and songs of praise from the happy ones who had crossed the
Delectable Mountains, had gone on through the fogs of the En-
chanted Ground, and entered the land of Beulah, were too much
for those over whose minds and bodies lively imaginations held
full sway.
The heart swelled, the nerves gave way, the hands
and feet grew cold, and motionless and speechless they fell head-
long to the ground. In a moment crowds gathered about them
to pray and shout. Some lay still as death. Some passed
through frightful twitchings of face and limb. At Cabin Creek
so many fell, that lest the multitude should tread on them, they
were carried to the meeting-house and laid in rows on the floor.
At Cane Ridge the number was three thousand.
The recollection of that famous meeting is still preserved in
Kentucky, where, not many years since, old men could be found
whose mothers had carried them to the camp-ground as infants,
and had left them at the roots of trees and behind logs while
the preaching and exhorting continued. Cane Ridge meeting-
house stood on a well-shaded, well-watered spot, seven miles from
the town of Paris. There a great space had been cleared, a
preacher's stand put up, and a huge tent stretched to shelter the
crowd from the sun and rain. But it did not cover the twen-
tieth part of the people who came. Every road that led to the
ground is described to have presented for several days an almost
unbroken line of wagons, horses, and men. One who saw the
meeting when it had just begun wrote home to Philadelphia that
## p. 9512 (#540) ###########################################
9512
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
wagons covered an area as large as that between Market Street
and Chestnut, Second and Third. Another, who counted them,
declared they numbered eleven hundred and forty-five. Seven
hundred and fifty lead tokens, stamped with the letters A or B,
were given by the Baptists to communicants; and there were still
upward of four hundred who received none. Old soldiers who
were present, and claimed to know something of the art of esti-
mating the numbers of masses of men, put down those encamped
at the Cane Ridge meeting as twenty thousand souls. The ex-
citement surpassed anything that had been known. Men who
came to scoff remained to preach. All day and all night the
crowd swarmed to and fro from preacher to preacher, singing,
shouting, laughing, now rushing off to listen to some new ex-
horter who had climbed upon a stump, now gathering around
some unfortunate, who in their peculiar language was "spiritu-
ally slain. " Soon men and women fell in such numbers that it
became impossible for the multitude to move about without
trampling them, and they were hurried to the meeting-house.
At no time was the floor less than half covered. Some lay quiet,
unable to move or speak. Some talked but could not move.
Some beat the floor with their heels. Some, shrieking in agony,
bounded about, it is said, like a live fish out of water. Many
lay down and rolled over and over for hours at a time. Others
rushed wildly over the stumps and benches, and then plunged,
shouting "Lost! Lost! " into the forest.
As the meetings grew more and m re frequent, this nervous
excitement assumed new and more terrible forms.
One was
known as jerking; another, as the barking exercise; a third, as
the Holy Laugh. "The jerks" began in the head and spread
rapidly to the feet. The head would be thrown from side to side
so swiftly that the features would be blotted out and the hair
made to snap.
When the body was affected, the sufferer was
hurled over hindrances that came in his way, and finally dashed
on the ground to bounce about like a ball. At camp-meetings in
the far South, saplings were cut off breast-high and left "for the
people to jerk by. " One who visited such a camp-ground declares
that about the roots of from fifty to one hundred saplings the
earth was kicked up "as by a horse stamping flies. " There only
the lukewarm, the lazy, the half-hearted, the indolent professor
was afflicted. Pious men, and scoffing physicians who sought to
get the jerks that they might speculate upon them, were not
## p. 9513 (#541) ###########################################
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
9513
touched. But the scoffer did not always escape. Not a professor
of religion within the region of the great revival but had heard
or could tell of some great conversion by special act of God.
One disbeliever, it was reported, while cursing and swearing, had
been crushed by a tree falling on him at the Cane Ridge meet-
ing. Another was said to have mounted his horse to ride away,
when the jerks seized him, pulled his feet from the stirrups,
and flung him on the ground, whence he rose a Christian man.
A lad who feigned sickness, kept from church, and lay abed, was
dragged out and dashed against the wall till he betook himself
to prayer. When peace was restored to him, he passed out into
his father's tan-yard to unhair a hide. Instantly the knife left his
hand, and he was drawn over logs and hurled against trees and
fences till he began to pray in serious earnest. A foolish woman
who went to see the jerks was herself soon rolling in the mud.
Scores of such stories passed from mouth to mouth, and may now
be read in the lives and narratives of the preachers. The com-
munity seemed demented. From the nerves and muscles the dis-
order passed to the mind. Men dreamed dreams and saw visions,
nay, fancied themselves dogs, went down on all fours, and barked
till they grew hoarse. It was no uncommon sight to behold
numbers of them gathered about a tree, barking, yelping, "treeing
the Devil. " Two years later, when much of the excitement of the
great revival had gone down, falling and jerking gave way to
hysterics. During the most earnest preaching and exhorting,
even sincere professors of religion would on a sudden burst into
loud laughter; others, unable to resist, would follow, and soon the
assembled multitude would join in. This was the "Holy Laugh,"
and became, after 1803, a recognized part of worship.
EFFECTS OF THE EMBARGO OF 1807
From a History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to
the Civil War. ' D. Appleton & Co. , 1885. Copyright 1885, by John Bach
McMaster.
PAR
ARALYSIS seized on the business of the coast towns and began
to spread inward. Ships were dismantled and left half
loaded at the wharves. Crews were discharged. The sound.
of the caulking-hammer was no longer heard in the ship-yards.
The sail-lofts were deserted, the rope-walks were closed; the
## p. 9514 (#542) ###########################################
9514
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
cartmen had nothing to do. In a twinkling the price of every
domestic commodity went down, and the price of every foreign
commodity went up. But no wages were earned, no business
was done, and money almost ceased to circulate.
The federal revenues fell from sixteen millions to a few
thousands.
The value of the shipping embargoed has
been estimated at fifty millions; and as the net earnings were
twenty-five per cent. , twelve and a half millions more were
lost to the country through the enforced idleness of the vessels.
From an estimate made at the time, it appears that one hundred
thousand men were believed to have been out of work for one
year. They earned from forty cents to one dollar and thirty-
three cents per day. Assuming a dollar as the average rate of
daily wages, the loss to the laboring class was in round numbers
thirty-six millions of dollars. On an average, thirty millions had
been invested annually in the purchase of foreign and domestic
produce. As this great sum was now seeking investment which
could not be found, its owners were deprived not only of their
profits, but of two millions of interest besides.
Unable to bear the strain, thousands on thousands went to
the wall. The newspapers were full of insolvent-debtor notices.
All over the country the court-house doors, the tavern doors,
the post-offices, the cross-road posts, were covered with advertise-
ments of sheriffs' sales. In the cities the jails were not large
enough to hold the debtors. At New York during 1809 thirteen
hundred men were imprisoned for no other crime than being
ruined by the embargo. A traveler who saw the city in this
day of distress assures us that it looked like a town ravaged by
pestilence. The counting-houses were shut or advertised to let.
The coffee-houses were almost empty. The streets along the
water-side were almost deserted. The ships were dismantled;
their decks were cleared, their hatches were battened down. Not
a box, not a cask, not a barrel, not a bale was to be seen on
the wharves, where the grass had begun to grow luxuriantly. A
year later, in this same city, eleven hundred and fifty men were
confined for debts under twenty-five dollars, and were clothed by
the Humane Society.
## p. 9515 (#543) ###########################################
9515
EMERICH MADÁCH
(1823-1864)
BY GEORGE ALEXANDER KOHUT
UNGARY is a favorite land of the Muses. Romance, ardent
sentiment, and a certain mystic fervor give to her poetry an
exquisite charm. A thrill of fire and passion vibrates in her
songs and melodies. Her folk-lore and ancient traditions teem with
rich Oriental imagery and beautiful conceptions. These ancient gems
have in the present century received a fresh setting at the hands of
the literary artists, who have borne witness
to the unabated vigor of this people "barbar-
ously grand. " Of the modern school, Petöfi
the lyric poet and Madách the dramatic are
the most popular poets of Hungary.
Madách Imre (for the family name comes
first in Hungarian) was born in Alsó Sztre-
gova, Hungary, January 21st, 1823; and died
in his native town October 5th, 1864. Of
his life little need be told. He was notary,
orator, and journalist; at an early age he
wrote a number of essays on natural science,
archæology, and æsthetics. He wrote lyric
as well as dramatic poetry; but it is chiefly
through his two dramatic poems, 'Moses'
and The Tragedy of Man,' written almost simultaneously in 1860,
that he is best known. An edition of his collected writings, in three
volumes, was issued by Paul Gyulai in Budapest, 1880. His master-
piece, The Tragedy of Man,' has been rendered into German no less
than five times; the latest version, by Julius Lechner von der Lech
(Leipzig, 1888, with a preface by Maurice Jókai), being the most feli-
citous. Alexander Fischer gave a splendid résumé of this powerful
drama in Sacher-Masoch's periodical, Auf der Höhe (Vol. xvi. , 1885),
-the only analysis of it in any language except Hungarian. Though
it is too philosophical and contemplative in character, and not in-
tended for the stage, its first production, which took place in Septem-
ber 1883, created an immense sensation both in Austria and Hungary.
To English readers, Madách is a total stranger. His name is
scarcely ever found in any encyclopædia or biographical dictionary;
EMERICH MADÁCH
## p. 9516 (#544) ###########################################
9516
EMERICH MADÁCH
and strangely enough, no attempt has been thus far made to give
even a selection from this latter-day Milton of Hungary.
It is not here intended to explain the origin and inner development
of this fascinating drama, nor to draw elaborate parallels between
its author and his predecessors in other lands. Such a comparative
critical study would be interesting as showing the spiritual kinship
between master minds, centuries distant from one another, whose
sympathies are in direct touch with our own ideals and life problems.
Madách will plead his own cause effectively enough. To him, how-
ever, who in reading the Tragedy of Man' involuntarily makes such
comparisons, and might be led unjustly to question the author's ori-
ginality, the graceful adage Grosse Geister treffen sich (Great minds
meet) will serve as an answer. He should rather say, with true
artistic estimate, that the shading in the one landscape of a higher
life helps to set off the vivid and brilliant coloring in the other; so
that the whole, viewed side by side, presents a series of wondrous
harmonies. Madách imbibed, no doubt, from foreign sources.
He
was familiar with 'Paradise Lost,' and with the now obsolete but
once much-lauded epic, 'La Semaine (The Week), of Milton's French
predecessor Du Bartas; Alfieri's tramelogedia, 'Abele,' and Gesner's
'Death of Abel,' as well as Byron's 'Mystery of Cain,' may also have
come to his notice; Goethe's 'Faust' appears more than once, and may
be recognized in any incognito. Yet we cannot say with certainty
that any one of these masterpieces influenced his own work, any more
than Milton inspired the great German bard. We might as justly
tax him with drawing upon Hebrew tradition for the entire plot of
his drama, beginning with the fourth scene; for strangely enough,
Adam's experiences with his mentor and Nemesis, Lucifer, are fore-
shadowed in the very same manner in a quaint legend of the Jewish
Rabbis, told nearly twenty centuries ago. The comparative study
of literature will reveal other facts equally amazing. It is of course
self-evident that the morbid pessimism which rings its vague alarms
throughout the book is that of Ecclesiastes, whose vanitas vanitatum
is the key to his doleful plaint.
"I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom concerning all
that is done under heaven: it is a sore travail that God hath given to the
sons of men to be exercised therewith. I have seen all the works that are
done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. . .
And I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I
perceived that this also was a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is
much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. " (Eccl.
and Jock was sure of receiving something from her as the result
## p. 9498 (#526) ###########################################
9498
NORMAN MACLEOD
of his weekly calls; but he never consigned a scrap of meat to
his wallet without a preliminary battle. On the evening of the
commemoration of the "Melampus" engagement, Babby was sit-
ting by the fire watching a fowl which twirled from the string
roasting for supper, and which dropped its unctuous lard on a
number of potatoes that lay basking in the tin receiver below.
A loud rap was heard at the back door; and to the question,
"Who's there? " the reply was heard of "Babbity, open! Open,
wee Babbity! Hee, hee, hee! "
"Gae wa wi' ye, ye daft cratur," said Babby.
"What right
hae ye to disturb folk at this time o' nicht? I'll let loose the
dog on you. "
Babby knew that Skye shared her dislike to Jock; as was
evident from his bark when he rose, and with curled tail began
snuffing at the foot of the door. Another knock, louder than
before, made Babby start.
"My word," she exclaimed, "but ye hae learned impudence! "
And afraid of disturbing "the company," she opened as much of
the door as enabled her to see and rebuke Jock.
"Hoo daur ye,
Jock, to rap sae loud as that? »
"Open, wee, wee, wee Babbity! " said Jock.
"Ye big, big, big blackguard, I'll dae naething o' the kind,"
said Babby as she shut the door. But the stick of the fool was
suddenly interposed. "That beats a'! " said Babby: "what the
sorrow d'ye want, Jock, to daur to presume — »
But to Babby's horror the door was forced open in the mid-
dle of her threat, and the fool entered, exclaiming, "I want a
kiss, my wee, wee, bonnie Babbity! "
"Preserve us a'! " exclaimed Babby, questioning whether she
should scream or fly, while the fool, turning his back to the
light, seized her by both her wrists, and imprinted a kiss on her
forehead.
"Skye! " half screamed Babby; but Skye was springing up,
as if anxious to kiss Jock. Babby fell back on a chair, and
catching a glimpse of the fool's face, she exclaimed, "O my
darling, my darling! O Neddy, Neddy, Neddy! " Flinging off
her cap, as she always did on occasions of great perplexity, she
seized him by the hands, and then sunk back, almost fainting, in
the chair.
"Silence, dear Babby! " said Ned, speaking in a whisper; "for
I want to astonish the old couple. How glad I am to see you!
## p. 9499 (#527) ###########################################
NORMAN MACLEOD
9499
Then
and they are all well, I know; and Freeman here, too! "
seizing the dog, he clasped him to his heart, while the brute
struggled with many an eager cry to kiss his old master's face.
Ned's impulse from the first was to rush into the parlor; but
he was restrained by that strange desire which all have experi-
enced in the immediate anticipation of some great joy,-to hold
it from us, as a parent does a child, before we seize it and clasp
it to our breast.
The small party, consisting of the captain, his wife, and Free-
man, were sitting round the parlor fire; Mrs. Fleming sewing,
and the others keeping up rather a dull conversation, as those
who felt, though they did not acknowledge, the presence of some-
thing at their hearts which hindered their usual freedom and
genial hilarity.
"Supper should be ready by this time," suggested the captain,
just as the scene between Ned and Babby was taking place in
the kitchen. "Babby and Skye seem busy: I shall ring, may I
not ? »
"If you please," said Mrs. Fleming; "but depend upon it,
Babby will cause no unnecessary delays. "
Babby speedily responded to the captain's ring. On entering
the room she burst into a fit of laughing. Mrs. Fleming put
down her work and looked at her servant as if she was mad.
"What do you mean, woman? " asked the captain with knit
brows: "I never saw you behave so before. "
"Maybe no. Ha! ha! ha! " said Babby; "but there's a queer
man wishing to speak wi' ye. " At this moment a violent ring
was heard from the door-bell.
-―― -
"A queer man-wishing to speak with me at this hour,"
muttered the captain, as if in utter perplexity.
Babby had retired to the lobby, and was ensconced, with her
apron in her mouth, in a corner near the kitchen. "You had
better open the door yersel'," cried Babby, smothering her laugh-
ter.
The captain, more puzzled than ever, went to the door, and
opening it was saluted with a gruff voice, saying, "I'm a poor
sailor, sir,—and knows you're an old salt, and have come to
see you, sir. "
"See me, sir! What do you want? " replied the captain
gruffly, as one whose kindness some impostor hoped to bene-
fit by.
-
## p. 9500 (#528) ###########################################
9500
NORMAN MACLEOD
"Wants nothing, sir," said the sailor, stepping near the captain.
A half-scream, half-laugh from Babby drew Mrs. Fleming and
Freeman to the lobby.
"You want nothing? What brings you to disturb me at this
hour of the night? Keep back, sir! ”
"Well, sir, seeing as how I sailed with Old Cairney, I thought
you would not refuse me a favor," replied the sailor in a hoarse
voice.
"Don't dare, sir," said the captain, "to come into my house
one step farther, till I know more about you. "
"Now, captain, don't be angry; you know as how that great
man Nelson expected every man to do his duty: all I want is
just to shake Mrs. Fleming by the hand, and then I go; that is,
if after that you want me for to go. "
"Mrs. Fleming! " exclaimed the captain, with the indignation
of a man who feels that the time has come for open war as
against a house-breaker. "If you dare — »
But Mrs. Fleming, seeing the rising storm, passed her husband
rapidly, and said to the supposed intruder, whom she assumed to
be a tipsy sailor, "There is my hand, if that's all you want: go
away now as you said, and don't breed any disturbance. "
But the sailor threw his arms around his mother, and Babby
rushed forward with a light; and then followed muffled cries
of "Mother! " "Father! " "Ned! " "My own boy! " "God be
praised! " until the lobby was emptied, and the parlor once more
alive with as joyous and thankful hearts as ever met in "hamlet
or in baron's ha'! "
HIGHLAND SCENERY
HER
ER great delight was in the scenery of that West Highland
country. Italy has its gorgeous beauty, and is a magnifi-
cent volume of poetry history, and art, superb within and
without, read by the light of golden sunsets. Switzerland is the
most perfect combination of beauty and grandeur; from its up-
lands with grass more green and closely shaven than an English
park; umbrageous with orchards; musical with rivulets; tinkling
with the bells of wandering cattle and flocks of goats; social with
picturesque villages gathered round the chapel spires-up to the
bare rocks and mighty cataracts of ice; until the eye rests on the
## p. 9501 (#529) ###########################################
NORMAN MACLEOD
9501
peaks of alabaster snow, clear and sharp in the intense blue of
the cloudless sky, which crown the whole marvelous picture with
awful grandeur! Norway too has its peculiar glory of fiords
worming their way like black water-snakes among gigantic mount-
ains, lofty precipices, or primeval forests. But the scenery of the
Western Highlands has a distinctive character of its own. It is
not beauty, in spite of its knolls of birch and oak copse that
fringe the mountain lochs and the innumerable bights and bays
of pearly sand. Nor is it grandeur — although there is a wonder-
ful vastness in its far-stretching landscapes of ocean meeting the
horizon, or of hills beyond hills, in endless ridges, mingling afar
with the upper sky. But in the sombre coloring of its mount-
ains; in the silence of its untrodden valleys; in the extent of its
bleak and undulating moors; in the sweep of its rocky corries;
in the shifting mists and clouds that hang over its dark preci-
pices: in all this kind of scenery, along with the wild traditions
which ghost-like float around its ancient keeps, and live in the
tales of its inhabitants, there is a glory and a sadness, most affect-
ing to the imagination, and suggestive of a period of romance
and song, of clanships and of feudal attachments, which, banished
from the rest of Europe, took refuge and lingered long in those
rocky fastnesses, before they "passed away forever on their dun
wings from Morven. "
Μ'
MY LITTLE MAY
Y LITTLE May was like a lintie
Glintin' 'mang the flowers o' spring;
Like a lintie she was cantie,
Like a lintie she could sing;-
Singing, milking in the gloamin',
Singing, herding in the morn,
Singing 'mang the brackens roaming,
Singing shearing yellow corn!
Oh the bonnie dell and dingle,
Oh the bonnie flowering glen,
Oh the bonnie bleezin' ingle,
Oh the bonnie but and ben!
Ilka body smiled that met her,
Nane were glad that said fareweel:
## p. 9502 (#530) ###########################################
9502
NORMAN MACLEOD
Never was a blyther, better,
Bonnier bairn, frae croon to heel!
Oh the bonnie dell and dingle,
Oh the bonnie flowering glen,
Oh the bonnie bleezin' ingle,
Oh the bonnie but and ben!
Blaw, wintry winds, blaw cauld and eerie,
Drive the sleet and drift the snaw:
May is sleeping, she was weary,
For her heart was broke in twa!
Oh wae the dell and dingle,
Oh wae the flowering glen;
Oh wae aboot the ingle,
Wae's me baith but and ben'
## p. 9503 (#531) ###########################################
9503
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
(1852-)
HE change in aim and method of the modern historian has
kept pace with the development of the democratic idea.
Where before, in the study and writing of history, the do-
ings of rulers and courts and the working of governmental machinery
have been the chief points of interest, to the exclusion of the every-
day deeds and needs of the nation, the tendency to-day is to lay
emphasis on the life of the people broadly viewed, -the development
of the social organism in all its parts. The feeling behind this
tendency is based on a conviction that the
true vitality of a country depends upon the
healthy growth and general welfare of the
great mass of plain folk,-the working,
struggling, wealth-producing people who
make it up.
The modern historian, in a
word, makes man in the State, irrespective
of class or position, his subject for sympa-
thetic portrayal.
This type of historian is represented by
John Bach McMaster, whose 'History of
the People of the United States' strives to
give a picture of social rather than consti-
tutional and political growth: those phases JOHN BACH MCMASTER
of American history have been treated ably
by Adams, Schouler, and others. Professor McMaster, with admirable
lucidity and simplicity of style, and always with an appeal to fact
precluding the danger of the subjective writing of history to fit a
theory, tells this vital story of the national evolution, and tells it as
it has not been told before. The very title of his work defines its
purpose. It is a history not of the United States, but of the people
of the United States,-like Green's great 'History of the English
People,' another work having the same ideal, the modern attitude.
The period covered in Professor McMaster's plan is that reaching
from the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 to the outbreak of the
Civil War,-less than one hundred years, but a crucial time for
the shaping of the country. The depiction of the formative time,
the day of the pioneer and the settler,- of the crude beginnings of
## p. 9504 (#532) ###########################################
9504
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
civilization, engages his particular attention and receives his most
careful treatment. An example is given in the selection chosen from
his work, which gains warmth and picturesqueness in this way. The
first volume of his work appeared in 1883; the fourth (bringing the
account down to 1821) in 1895. Several volumes must be forthcom-
ing to complete the study. Professor McMaster has allowed himself
space and leisure in order to make an exhaustive survey of the field,
and a synthetic presentation of the material. His history when fin-
ished will be of very great value. His preparation for it began in
1870, when he was a young student, and it will be his life work and
monument.
-
John Bach McMaster was born in Brooklyn, June 29th, 1852; and
received his education at the College of the City of New York, his
graduation year being 1872. He taught a little, studied civil engi-
neering, and in 1877 became instructor in that branch at Princeton.
Thence he was called in 1883 to the University of Pennsylvania, to
take the chair of American history, which he still holds. Professor
McMaster is also an attractive essayist. His 'Benjamin Franklin as
a Man of Letters' (1887) is an excellent piece of biography; and
the volume of papers called 'With the Fathers' (1896) contains a
series of historical portraits sound in scholarship and very readable
in manner. In his insistence on the presenting of the unadorned
truth, his dislike of pseudo-hero worship, Professor McMaster seems at
times iconoclastic. But while he is not entirely free from prejudice,
his intention is to give no false lights to the picture, and few his-
torians have been broader minded and fairer.
TOWN AND COUNTRY LIFE IN 1800
From 'A History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to
the Civil War. D. Appleton & Co. , 1885. Copyright 1885, by John Bach
McMaster.
WHAT
HAT was then known as the far West was Kentucky, Ohio,
and central New York. Into it the emigrants came
streaming along either of two routes. Men from New
England took the most northern, and went out by Albany and
Troy to the great wilderness which lay along the Mohawk and
the lakes. They came by tens of thousands from farms and vil-
lages, and represented every trade, every occupation, every walk
in life, save one: none were seafarers. No whaler left his vessel;
no seaman deserted his mess; no fisherman of Marblehead or
Gloucester exchanged the dangers of a life on the ocean for the
## p. 9505 (#533) ###########################################
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
9505
privations of a life in the West. Their fathers and their uncles
had been fishermen before them, and their sons were to follow
in their steps. Long before a lad could nib a quill, or make a
pot-hook, or read half the precepts his primer contained, he knew
the name of every brace and stay, every sail and part of a Grand
Banker and a Chebacco, all the nautical terms, what line and
hook should be used for catching halibut and what for mackerel
and cod. If he ever learned to write, he did so at "writing-
school," which, like singing-school, was held at night, and to
which he came bringing his own dipped candle, his own paper,
and his own pen. The candlestick was a scooped-out turnip, or
a piece of board with a nail driven through it. His paper he
ruled with a piece of lead, for the graphite lead-pencil was un-
known. All he knew of theology, and much of his knowledge of
reading and spelling, was gained with the help of the New Eng-
land Primer. There is not, and there never was, a text-book so
richly deserving a history as the Primer. The earliest mention
of it in print now known is to be found in an almanac for the
year 1691. The public are there informed that a second impres-
sion is "in press, and will suddenly be extant"; and will con-
tain, among much else that is new, the verses John Rogers the
Martyr made and left as a legacy to his children. When the
second impression became extant, a rude cut of Rogers lashed to
the stake, and while the flames burned fiercely, discoursing to his
wife and nine small children, embellished the verses, as it has
done in every one of the innumerable editions since struck off.
The tone of the Primer is deeply religious. Two thirds of the
four-and-twenty pictures placed before the couplets and triplets
in rhyme, from
to
"In Adam's fall
We sinnèd all,"
"Zaccheus, he
Did climb a tree
Our Lord to see,"
represent Biblical incidents. Twelve "words of six syllables" are
given in the spelling lesson. Five of them are-abomination, edi-
fication, humiliation, mortification, purification. More than half
the book is made up of the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, some
of Watts's hymns, and the whole of that great Catechism which
one hundred and twenty divines spent five years in preparing.
XVI-595
## p. 9506 (#534) ###########################################
9506
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
There too are Mr. Rogers's verses, and John Cotton's 'Spiritual
Milk for American Babes'; exhortations not to cheat at play,
not to lie, not to use ill words, not to call ill names, not to be a
dunce, and to love school. The Primer ends with the famous
dialogue between Christ, Youth, and the Devil.
Moved by pity and a wish to make smooth the rough path to
learning, some kind soul prepared 'A Lottery-Book for Children. '
The only difficulty in teaching children to read was, he thought,
the difficulty of keeping their minds from roaming; and to "pre-
vent this precipitancy" was the object of the 'Lottery-Book. ' On
one side of each leaf was a letter of the alphabet; on the other
two pictures. As soon, he explained, as the child could speak, it
should thrust a pin through the leaf from the side whereon the
pictures were, at the letter on the other, and should continue to
do this till at last the letter was pierced. Turning the leaf after
each trial, the mind of the child would be fixed so often and so
long on the letter that it would ever after be remembered.
The illustrations in the book are beneath those of a patent-
medicine almanac, but are quite as good as any that can be found
in children's books of that day. No child had then ever seen
such specimens of the wood-engraver's and the printer's and the
binder's arts as now, at the approach of every Christmas, issue
from hundreds of presses. The covers of such chap-books were
bits of wood, and the backs coarse leather. On the covers was
sometimes a common blue paper, and sometimes a hideous wall-
paper, adorned with horses and dogs, roosters and eagles, standing
in marvelous attitudes on gilt or copper scrolls. The letterpress
of none
was specially illustrated, but the same cut was used
again and again to express the most opposite ideas. A woman
with a dog holding her train is now Vanity, and now Miss All-
worthy going abroad to buy books for her brother and sister.
A huge vessel with three masts is now a yacht, and now the
ship in which Robinson Crusoe sailed from Hull. The virtuous
woman that is a crown to her husband, and naughty Miss Kitty
Bland, are one and the same. Master Friendly listening to the
minister at church now heads a catechism, and now figures as
Tommy Careless in the 'Adventures of a Week. ' A man and
woman feeding beggars become, in time, transformed into a
servant introducing two misers to his mistress. But no creature
played so many parts as a bird, which after being named an
eagle, a cuckoo, and a kite, is called finally Noah's dove.
## p. 9507 (#535) ###########################################
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
9507
Mean and cheap as such chap-books were, the peddler who
hawked them sold not one to the good wives of a fishing village.
The women had not the money to buy with; the boys had not
the disposition to read. Till he was nine, a lad did little more
than watch the men pitch pennies in the road, listen to sea
stories, and hurry, at the cry of "Rock him," "Squail him," to
help his playmates pelt with stones some unoffending boy from a
neighboring village. By the time he had seen his tenth birth-
day he was old enough not to be seasick, not to cry during a
storm at sea, and to be of some use about a ship; and went on
his first trip to the Banks. The skipper and the crew called him
"cut-tail"; for he received no money save for the fish he caught,
and each one he caught was marked by snipping a piece from
the tail. After an apprenticeship of three or four years the
"cut-tail" became a "header," stood upon the same footing as
the «< sharesmen," and learned all the duties which a
"splitter"
and a «< salter" must perform. A crew numbered eight; four were
"sharesmen" and four were apprentices; went twice a year to
the Banks, and stayed each time from three to five months.
Men who had passed through such a training were under no
temptation to travel westward. They took no interest, they bore
no part in the great exodus. They still continued to make their
trips and bring home their "fares"; while hosts of New-England-
ers poured into New York, opening the valleys, founding cities,
and turning struggling hamlets into villages of no mean kind.
Catskill, in 1792, numbered ten dwellings and owned one vessel
of sixty tons. In 1800 there were in the place one hundred
and fifty-six houses, two ships, a schooner, and eight sloops of
one hundred tons each, all owned there and employed in carry-
ing produce to New York. Six hundred and twenty-four bushels
of wheat were brought to the Catskill market in 1792. Forty-
six thousand one hundred and sixty-four bushels came in 1800.
On a single day in 1801 the merchants bought four thousand
one hundred and eight bushels of wheat, and the same day
eight hundred loaded sleighs came into the village by the west-
ern road. In 1790 a fringe of clearings ran along the western
shore of Lake Champlain to the northern border, and pushed
out through the broad valley between the Adirondacks and the
Catskills to Seneca and Cayuga Lakes. In 1800 the Adirondack
region was wholly surrounded. The emigrants had passed Oneida
Lake, had passed Oswego, and skirting the shores of Ontario
## p. 9508 (#536) ###########################################
9508
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
and the banks of the St. Lawrence, had joined with those on
Lake Champlain. Some had gone down the valleys of the
Delaware and Susquehanna to the southern border of the State.
The front of emigration was far beyond Elmira and Bath. Just
before it went the speculators, the land-jobbers, the men afflicted
with what in derision was called "terraphobia. " They formed
companies and bought millions of acres. They went singly and
purchased whole townships as fast as the surveyors could locate;
buying on trust and selling for wheat, for lumber, for whatever
the land could yield or the settler give. Nor was the pioneer
less infatuated. An irresistible longing drove him westward, and
still westward, till some Indian scalped him, or till hunger, want,
bad food, and exposure broke him down, and the dreaded Genesee
fever swept him away. The moment such a man had built a
log cabin, cleared an acre, girdled the trees, and sowed a hand-
ful of grain, he was impatient to be once more moving. He had
no peace till his little farm was sold, and he had plunged into
the forest to seek a new and temporary home. The purchaser
in time would make a few improvements, clear a few more acres,
plant a little more grain, and then in turn sell and hurry west-
ward. After him came the founders of villages and towns, who,
when the cabins about them numbered ten, felt crowded and
likewise moved away.
Travelers through the Genesee valley tell
us they could find no man who had not in this way changed
his abode at least six
times. The hardships which these people
endured is beyond description. Their poverty was extreme.
Nothing was so scarce as food; many a wayfarer was turned
from their doors with the solemn assurance that they had not
enough for themselves. The only window in many a cabin was
a hole in the roof for the smoke to pass through. In the win-
ter the snow beat through the chinks and sifted under the door,
till it was heaped up about the sleepers on the floor before the
fire.
Beyond the Blue Ridge everything was most primitive. Half
the roads were " traces
» and blazed. More than half the houses,
even in the settlements, were log cabins. When a stranger came
to such a place to stay, the men built him a cabin and made
the building an occasion for sport. The trees felled, four corner-
men were elected to notch the logs; and while they were busy
the others ran races, wrestled, played leap-frog, kicked the hat,
fought, gouged, gambled, drank, did everything then considered
## p. 9509 (#537) ###########################################
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
9509
After the notching was finished the raising took
Many a time the cabin was built, roofed, the
door and window cut out, and the owner moved in, before sun-
down. The chinks were stopped with chips and smeared with
mud. The chimney was of logs, coated with mud six inches
thick. The table and the benches, the bedstead and the door,
were such as could be made with an axe, an auger, and a saw.
A rest for the rifle and some pegs for clothes completed the
fittings.
an amusement.
but a few hours.
The clothing of a man was in summer a wool hat, a blue
linsey hunting-shirt with a cape, a belt with a gayly colored
fringe, deerskin or linsey pantaloons, and moccasins and shoe-
packs of tanned leather. Fur hats were not common. A boot
was rarely to be seen. In winter, a striped linsey vest and a
white blanket coat were added. If the coat had buttons- and it
seldom had-they were made by covering slices of a cork with
bits of blanket. Food which he did not obtain by his rifle and
his traps he purchased by barter. Corn was the staple; and no
mills being near, it was pounded between two stones or rubbed
on a grater. Pork cost him twelve cents a pound, and salt
four. Dry fish was a luxury, and brought twenty cents a pound.
Sugar was often as high as forty. When he went to a settle-
ment he spent his time at the billiard-table, or in the "keg
grocery" playing Loo or "Finger in Danger," to determine who
should pay for the whisky consumed. Pious men were terrified
at the drunkenness, the vice, the gambling, the brutal fights,
the gouging, the needless duels they beheld on every hand.
Already the Kentucky boatmen had become more dreaded than
the Indians. "A Kentuc" in 1800 had much the same meaning
that a cowboy" has now. He was the most reckless, fearless,
law-despising of men. A common description of him was half
horse, half alligator, tipped with snapping-turtle.
On a sudden this community, which the preachers had often
called Satan's stronghold, underwent a moral awakening such as
this world had never beheld.
Two young men began the great work in the summer of 1799.
They were brothers, preachers, and on their way across the
pine barrens to Ohio, but turned aside to be present at a sacra-
mental solemnity on Red River. The people were accustomed
to gather at such times on a Friday, and by praying, singing,
and hearing sermons, prepare themselves for the reception of the
## p. 9510 (#538) ###########################################
9510
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
sacrament on Sunday. At the Red River meeting the brothers
were asked to preach, and one did so with astonishing fervor.
As he spoke, the people were deeply moved; tears ran streaming
down their faces, and one, a woman far in the rear of the house,
broke through order and began to shout. For two hours after
the regular preachers had gone, the crowd lingered and were
loath to depart. While they tarried, one of the brothers was
irresistibly impelled to speak. He rose and told them that he
felt called to preach, that he could not be silent. The words
which then fell from his lips roused the people before him "to a
pungent sense of sin. " Again and again the woman shouted,
and would not be silent. He started to go to her. The crowd
begged him to turn back. Something within him urged him on,
and he went through the house shouting and exhorting and
praising God. In a moment the floor, to use his own words,
«< was covered with the slain. " Their cries for mercy were
terrible to hear. Some found forgiveness, but many went away
"spiritually wounded" and suffering unutterable agony of soul.
Nothing could allay the excitement. Every settlement along the
Green River and the Cumberland was full of religious fervor.
Men fitted their wagons with beds and provisions, and traveled
fifty miles to camp upon the ground and hear him preach.
The idea was new; hundreds adopted it, and camp-meetings
began. There was now no longer any excuse to stay away
from preaching. Neither distance, nor lack of houses, nor scar-
city of food, nor daily occupations prevailed. Led by curiosity,
by excitement, by religious zeal, families of every Protestant
denomination — Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians
-hurried to the camp-ground. Crops were left half gathered;
every kind of work was left undone; cabins were deserted; in
large settlements there did not remain one soul. The first
regular general camp-meeting was held at the Gasper River
Church, in July, 1800; but the rage spread, and a dozen encamp-
ments followed in quick succession. Camp-meeting was always
in the forest near some little church, which served as the preach-
ers' lodge. At one end of a clearing was a rude stage, and
before it the stumps and trunks of hewn trees, on which the
listeners sat. About the clearing were the tents and wagons
ranged in rows like streets. The praying, the preaching, the
exhorting would sometimes last for seven days, and be prolonged
every day until darkness had begun to give way to light. Nor
-
## p. 9511 (#539) ###########################################
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
9511
were the ministers the only exhorters. Men and women, nay,
even children took part. At Cane Ridge a little girl of seven
sat upon the shoulder of a man and preached to the multitude
till she sank exhausted on her bearer's head. At Indian Creek a
lad of twelve mounted a stump and exhorted till he grew weak,
whereupon two men upheld him, and he continued till speech
was impossible. A score of sinners fell prostrate before him.
At no time was the "falling exercise" so prevalent as at night.
Nothing was then wanting that could strike terror into minds
weak, timid, and harassed. The red glare of the camp-fires re-
flected from hundreds of tents and wagons; the dense blackness
of the flickering shadows, the darkness of the surrounding forest,
made still more terrible by the groans and screams of the "spir-
itually wounded," who had fled to it for comfort; the entreaty
of the preachers; the sobs and shrieks of the downcast still walk-
ing through the dark valley of the Shadow of Death; the shouts
and songs of praise from the happy ones who had crossed the
Delectable Mountains, had gone on through the fogs of the En-
chanted Ground, and entered the land of Beulah, were too much
for those over whose minds and bodies lively imaginations held
full sway.
The heart swelled, the nerves gave way, the hands
and feet grew cold, and motionless and speechless they fell head-
long to the ground. In a moment crowds gathered about them
to pray and shout. Some lay still as death. Some passed
through frightful twitchings of face and limb. At Cabin Creek
so many fell, that lest the multitude should tread on them, they
were carried to the meeting-house and laid in rows on the floor.
At Cane Ridge the number was three thousand.
The recollection of that famous meeting is still preserved in
Kentucky, where, not many years since, old men could be found
whose mothers had carried them to the camp-ground as infants,
and had left them at the roots of trees and behind logs while
the preaching and exhorting continued. Cane Ridge meeting-
house stood on a well-shaded, well-watered spot, seven miles from
the town of Paris. There a great space had been cleared, a
preacher's stand put up, and a huge tent stretched to shelter the
crowd from the sun and rain. But it did not cover the twen-
tieth part of the people who came. Every road that led to the
ground is described to have presented for several days an almost
unbroken line of wagons, horses, and men. One who saw the
meeting when it had just begun wrote home to Philadelphia that
## p. 9512 (#540) ###########################################
9512
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
wagons covered an area as large as that between Market Street
and Chestnut, Second and Third. Another, who counted them,
declared they numbered eleven hundred and forty-five. Seven
hundred and fifty lead tokens, stamped with the letters A or B,
were given by the Baptists to communicants; and there were still
upward of four hundred who received none. Old soldiers who
were present, and claimed to know something of the art of esti-
mating the numbers of masses of men, put down those encamped
at the Cane Ridge meeting as twenty thousand souls. The ex-
citement surpassed anything that had been known. Men who
came to scoff remained to preach. All day and all night the
crowd swarmed to and fro from preacher to preacher, singing,
shouting, laughing, now rushing off to listen to some new ex-
horter who had climbed upon a stump, now gathering around
some unfortunate, who in their peculiar language was "spiritu-
ally slain. " Soon men and women fell in such numbers that it
became impossible for the multitude to move about without
trampling them, and they were hurried to the meeting-house.
At no time was the floor less than half covered. Some lay quiet,
unable to move or speak. Some talked but could not move.
Some beat the floor with their heels. Some, shrieking in agony,
bounded about, it is said, like a live fish out of water. Many
lay down and rolled over and over for hours at a time. Others
rushed wildly over the stumps and benches, and then plunged,
shouting "Lost! Lost! " into the forest.
As the meetings grew more and m re frequent, this nervous
excitement assumed new and more terrible forms.
One was
known as jerking; another, as the barking exercise; a third, as
the Holy Laugh. "The jerks" began in the head and spread
rapidly to the feet. The head would be thrown from side to side
so swiftly that the features would be blotted out and the hair
made to snap.
When the body was affected, the sufferer was
hurled over hindrances that came in his way, and finally dashed
on the ground to bounce about like a ball. At camp-meetings in
the far South, saplings were cut off breast-high and left "for the
people to jerk by. " One who visited such a camp-ground declares
that about the roots of from fifty to one hundred saplings the
earth was kicked up "as by a horse stamping flies. " There only
the lukewarm, the lazy, the half-hearted, the indolent professor
was afflicted. Pious men, and scoffing physicians who sought to
get the jerks that they might speculate upon them, were not
## p. 9513 (#541) ###########################################
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
9513
touched. But the scoffer did not always escape. Not a professor
of religion within the region of the great revival but had heard
or could tell of some great conversion by special act of God.
One disbeliever, it was reported, while cursing and swearing, had
been crushed by a tree falling on him at the Cane Ridge meet-
ing. Another was said to have mounted his horse to ride away,
when the jerks seized him, pulled his feet from the stirrups,
and flung him on the ground, whence he rose a Christian man.
A lad who feigned sickness, kept from church, and lay abed, was
dragged out and dashed against the wall till he betook himself
to prayer. When peace was restored to him, he passed out into
his father's tan-yard to unhair a hide. Instantly the knife left his
hand, and he was drawn over logs and hurled against trees and
fences till he began to pray in serious earnest. A foolish woman
who went to see the jerks was herself soon rolling in the mud.
Scores of such stories passed from mouth to mouth, and may now
be read in the lives and narratives of the preachers. The com-
munity seemed demented. From the nerves and muscles the dis-
order passed to the mind. Men dreamed dreams and saw visions,
nay, fancied themselves dogs, went down on all fours, and barked
till they grew hoarse. It was no uncommon sight to behold
numbers of them gathered about a tree, barking, yelping, "treeing
the Devil. " Two years later, when much of the excitement of the
great revival had gone down, falling and jerking gave way to
hysterics. During the most earnest preaching and exhorting,
even sincere professors of religion would on a sudden burst into
loud laughter; others, unable to resist, would follow, and soon the
assembled multitude would join in. This was the "Holy Laugh,"
and became, after 1803, a recognized part of worship.
EFFECTS OF THE EMBARGO OF 1807
From a History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to
the Civil War. ' D. Appleton & Co. , 1885. Copyright 1885, by John Bach
McMaster.
PAR
ARALYSIS seized on the business of the coast towns and began
to spread inward. Ships were dismantled and left half
loaded at the wharves. Crews were discharged. The sound.
of the caulking-hammer was no longer heard in the ship-yards.
The sail-lofts were deserted, the rope-walks were closed; the
## p. 9514 (#542) ###########################################
9514
JOHN BACH MCMASTER
cartmen had nothing to do. In a twinkling the price of every
domestic commodity went down, and the price of every foreign
commodity went up. But no wages were earned, no business
was done, and money almost ceased to circulate.
The federal revenues fell from sixteen millions to a few
thousands.
The value of the shipping embargoed has
been estimated at fifty millions; and as the net earnings were
twenty-five per cent. , twelve and a half millions more were
lost to the country through the enforced idleness of the vessels.
From an estimate made at the time, it appears that one hundred
thousand men were believed to have been out of work for one
year. They earned from forty cents to one dollar and thirty-
three cents per day. Assuming a dollar as the average rate of
daily wages, the loss to the laboring class was in round numbers
thirty-six millions of dollars. On an average, thirty millions had
been invested annually in the purchase of foreign and domestic
produce. As this great sum was now seeking investment which
could not be found, its owners were deprived not only of their
profits, but of two millions of interest besides.
Unable to bear the strain, thousands on thousands went to
the wall. The newspapers were full of insolvent-debtor notices.
All over the country the court-house doors, the tavern doors,
the post-offices, the cross-road posts, were covered with advertise-
ments of sheriffs' sales. In the cities the jails were not large
enough to hold the debtors. At New York during 1809 thirteen
hundred men were imprisoned for no other crime than being
ruined by the embargo. A traveler who saw the city in this
day of distress assures us that it looked like a town ravaged by
pestilence. The counting-houses were shut or advertised to let.
The coffee-houses were almost empty. The streets along the
water-side were almost deserted. The ships were dismantled;
their decks were cleared, their hatches were battened down. Not
a box, not a cask, not a barrel, not a bale was to be seen on
the wharves, where the grass had begun to grow luxuriantly. A
year later, in this same city, eleven hundred and fifty men were
confined for debts under twenty-five dollars, and were clothed by
the Humane Society.
## p. 9515 (#543) ###########################################
9515
EMERICH MADÁCH
(1823-1864)
BY GEORGE ALEXANDER KOHUT
UNGARY is a favorite land of the Muses. Romance, ardent
sentiment, and a certain mystic fervor give to her poetry an
exquisite charm. A thrill of fire and passion vibrates in her
songs and melodies. Her folk-lore and ancient traditions teem with
rich Oriental imagery and beautiful conceptions. These ancient gems
have in the present century received a fresh setting at the hands of
the literary artists, who have borne witness
to the unabated vigor of this people "barbar-
ously grand. " Of the modern school, Petöfi
the lyric poet and Madách the dramatic are
the most popular poets of Hungary.
Madách Imre (for the family name comes
first in Hungarian) was born in Alsó Sztre-
gova, Hungary, January 21st, 1823; and died
in his native town October 5th, 1864. Of
his life little need be told. He was notary,
orator, and journalist; at an early age he
wrote a number of essays on natural science,
archæology, and æsthetics. He wrote lyric
as well as dramatic poetry; but it is chiefly
through his two dramatic poems, 'Moses'
and The Tragedy of Man,' written almost simultaneously in 1860,
that he is best known. An edition of his collected writings, in three
volumes, was issued by Paul Gyulai in Budapest, 1880. His master-
piece, The Tragedy of Man,' has been rendered into German no less
than five times; the latest version, by Julius Lechner von der Lech
(Leipzig, 1888, with a preface by Maurice Jókai), being the most feli-
citous. Alexander Fischer gave a splendid résumé of this powerful
drama in Sacher-Masoch's periodical, Auf der Höhe (Vol. xvi. , 1885),
-the only analysis of it in any language except Hungarian. Though
it is too philosophical and contemplative in character, and not in-
tended for the stage, its first production, which took place in Septem-
ber 1883, created an immense sensation both in Austria and Hungary.
To English readers, Madách is a total stranger. His name is
scarcely ever found in any encyclopædia or biographical dictionary;
EMERICH MADÁCH
## p. 9516 (#544) ###########################################
9516
EMERICH MADÁCH
and strangely enough, no attempt has been thus far made to give
even a selection from this latter-day Milton of Hungary.
It is not here intended to explain the origin and inner development
of this fascinating drama, nor to draw elaborate parallels between
its author and his predecessors in other lands. Such a comparative
critical study would be interesting as showing the spiritual kinship
between master minds, centuries distant from one another, whose
sympathies are in direct touch with our own ideals and life problems.
Madách will plead his own cause effectively enough. To him, how-
ever, who in reading the Tragedy of Man' involuntarily makes such
comparisons, and might be led unjustly to question the author's ori-
ginality, the graceful adage Grosse Geister treffen sich (Great minds
meet) will serve as an answer. He should rather say, with true
artistic estimate, that the shading in the one landscape of a higher
life helps to set off the vivid and brilliant coloring in the other; so
that the whole, viewed side by side, presents a series of wondrous
harmonies. Madách imbibed, no doubt, from foreign sources.
He
was familiar with 'Paradise Lost,' and with the now obsolete but
once much-lauded epic, 'La Semaine (The Week), of Milton's French
predecessor Du Bartas; Alfieri's tramelogedia, 'Abele,' and Gesner's
'Death of Abel,' as well as Byron's 'Mystery of Cain,' may also have
come to his notice; Goethe's 'Faust' appears more than once, and may
be recognized in any incognito. Yet we cannot say with certainty
that any one of these masterpieces influenced his own work, any more
than Milton inspired the great German bard. We might as justly
tax him with drawing upon Hebrew tradition for the entire plot of
his drama, beginning with the fourth scene; for strangely enough,
Adam's experiences with his mentor and Nemesis, Lucifer, are fore-
shadowed in the very same manner in a quaint legend of the Jewish
Rabbis, told nearly twenty centuries ago. The comparative study
of literature will reveal other facts equally amazing. It is of course
self-evident that the morbid pessimism which rings its vague alarms
throughout the book is that of Ecclesiastes, whose vanitas vanitatum
is the key to his doleful plaint.
"I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom concerning all
that is done under heaven: it is a sore travail that God hath given to the
sons of men to be exercised therewith. I have seen all the works that are
done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. . .
And I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I
perceived that this also was a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is
much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. " (Eccl.
