through all the stages of delirium. These fixed ideas and erroneous convictions are apt to be produced; but they are very evanescent, they last but a few seconds; it is only when there is any actual physical disorder that they remain for any length of time. The ordinary effect of this marvellous drug, however, is an ideal existence, so delicious that there is no wish to shake it off. The Orientalist, when he indulges in it, retires into the depths of the harem; no one is then admitted who cannot contribute to his enjoyment. He surrounds himself with the almehs or dancinggirls, who perform their graceful evolutions before him to the sound of music; gradually a new condition of the brain allows a series of illusions, arising from the external senses, to present themselves. Everything wears a fantastic garb. The mind is overpowered by the brilliancy of gorgeous visions; discrimination, comparison, reason, yield up their throne to dreams and phantoms which exhilarate and delight. The mind tries to understand what is the cause of the new delight, but it is in vain. It seems to know that there is no reality. The positive sensation of universal contentment is the marked feature of the state; it pervades every fibre, and leaves nothing to desire. The narrative of the monarch, so admirably told in the "Spectator," who, though plunging his head for an instant only in water, lived during that short time several years in another existence, and went through numerous vicissitudes, seems realized. On one occasion, when Dr. Moreau, previously to his going into the opera-house, had taken his accustomed dose, he fancied that he was nearly three hours passing through the lobby before reaching to the boxes. This phenomenon attends equally upon opium-eating; centuries seem to elapse, during which long trains of visions stalk in endless line before the sight. Mr. De Quincey has furnished us, in his "Confessions of an Opium-Eater," with some most singular illustrations of this fact. It is not with impunity that the brain becomes disordered with frequent indulgence in the delicious poison; at last it becomes weakened, and incapable of separating the true from the false; the intoxication too frequently repeated leads to an occasional state of delirium, but this is manifested in a manner almost as singular as the effect just narrated. It must be remarked that, during the dream of joy, there is a consciousness that all is illusion; there is at no period a belief that anything that dances before the senses, or plays upon the imagination, is real; and when the mind returns to its wonted state it acknowledges its illusions, and only wonders at the marvels that have been excited. But after these fantasies have too frequently presented themselves, there arises a permanent morbidity of mind, having for its manifestation a fixed idea that of seeing beings belonging to an invisible world under various shapes. The Orientalists, and more especially the Arabians and the people of Egypt, believe, as is well known, in the existence of ginn or genii, a class of spirits forming an intermediate link between angels and man. There are in Egypt many persons who firmly believe that they have seen and held intercourse with these beings, nor can any attempt at reasoning persuade them that they have been deceived. The eaters of hashish are subject to such hallucinations. When Dr. Moreau was in Egypt, the dragoman, who was a man of superior sense, having been selected by Champollion as his interpreter, the captain of the vessel in which he went up the Nile, and several of the sailors, had seen genii. The captain had seen one under the form of a sheep, that had lost itself, and bleating very loudly; he took him home with the intention of shearing him, and making the wool into a garment, and then eating him, when suddenly he rose up in the form of a man to the height of twenty feet, and with a voice of thunder spoke to him, telling him he was a genius, and then disappeared. His dragoman had met an ass in the neighborhood of Cairo that he wished to lay hold of; it ran with the speed of lightning, announcing itself a genius with loud shouts of laughter. On another occasion he had been to the funeral of two holy men, Santons. He saw, and others saw very clearly with him, the coffins of the deceased lift themselves in the air, and place themselves on the height of Mokatam, a mountain near Cairo, in the mausoleum which had been destined for their reception. The individuals of whom Dr. Moreau speaks passed three months in his service, during which they were in the complete possession of their senses; but such was the state to which they were reduced by this drug, that they would upon any trifling occurrence be affected with these illusions, and neither ridicule nor reasoning could shake their belief. The limited use of the hashish in France has as yet led to no derangement of this kind; but the knowledge that such consequences result from it is of the greatest importance, as it acts as a check to an indulgence in that which would soon become a vice. It may be emphatically said that none of nature's laws can be violated with impunity, nor can that reason which renders man preeminent be misapplied without a punishment. WHO ARE THE TRULY VALUABLE IN SOCIETY.The value set upon a member of society should be, not according to the fineness or intensity of his feelings, to the acuteness of his sensibility, or to his readiness to weep for, or deplore the misery he may meet with in the world; but in proportion to the sacrifices he is ready to make, and to the knowledge and talents which he is able and willing to contribute towards removing this misery. To benefit mankind is a much more difficult task than some seem to imagine; it is not quite so easy as to make a display of amiable sensibility; the first requires long study and painful abstinence from the various alluring pleasures by which we are surrounded"; the second in most cases demands only a little acting, and even when sincere, is utterly useless to the public. - Westminster Review. PICTURES OF MANNERS IN ENGLAND IN THE TIMES OF JAMES II. 221 PICTURES OF MANNERS IN ENGLAND IN THE rots; but as soon as the tarts and cheesecakes TIMES OF JAMES II. BY T. B. MACAULAY. An early and highly picturesque chapter of Macaulay's History of England* is occupied with " a description of the state in which England was at the time when the crown passed from Charles II. to his brother" -the period at the opening of the work. Commencing with a brilliant picture of the progress of English wealth, the author turns to a view of the condition of things at a particular era, in population, taxation, the army and navy, the support of officials, agricultural and mineral resources, the people of the country and the towns, the clergyman, the squire, the manners of the capital, the literature, the science, the general cultivation and intelligence. This is a fine field for the unflagging genius of Macaulay, delighting equally in generalization and detail. These are characteristic passages. -Lit. World. of laymen. It had long been evident that this prac tice tended to degrade the priestly character. Laud had exerted himself to effect a change; and Charles the First had repeatedly issued positive orders that none but men of high rank should presume to keep domestic chaplains. But these injunctions had become obsolete. Indeed, during the domination of the Puritans, many of the ejected ministers of the Church of England could obtain bread and shelter only by attaching themselves to the households of royalist gentlemen; and the hab its which had been formed in those times of trouble continued long after the reestablishment of monarchy and episcopacy. In the mansions of men of liberal sentiments and cultivated understandings, the chaplain was doubtless treated with urbanity and kindness. His conversation, his literary assistance, his spiritual advice, were considered as an ample return for his food, his lodging, and his stipend. But this was not the general feeling of the country gentleman. The coarse and ignorant squire, who thought that it belonged to his dignity to have grace said every day at his table by an ecclesiastic in full canonicals, found means to reconcile dignity with economy. A young Levite-such was the phrase then in use-might be had for his board, a small garret, and ten pounds a year, and might not only perform his own professional functions, might not only be the most patient of buts and listeners, might not only be always ready in fine weather for bowls, and in rainy weather for shovelboard, but might also save the expense of a gardener, or of a groom. Sometimes the reverend man nailed up the apricots, and sometimes fre curried the coachhorses. He cast up the farrier's bills. He walked ten miles with a message or a parcel. If he was permitted to dine with the family, he was expected to content himself with the plainest fare. He might fill himself with the corned beef and the car * In press of Harper & Brothers, New York. made their appearance, he quitted his seat, and stood aloof till he was summoned to return thanks for the repast, from a great part of which he had been excluded.* Perhaps after some years of service he was pre sented to a living sufficient to support him; but he often found it necessary to purchase his preferment by a species of simony, which furnished an inexhaust ible subject of pleasantry to three or four generations of scoffers. With his cure he was expecteu to take a wife. The wife had ordinarily been in the patron's service; and it was well if she was not suspected of standing too high in the patron' favor. Indeed, the nature of the matrimonial con nections which the clergymen of that age were in. the habit of forming, is the most certain indication of the place which the order held in the social system. An Oxonian, writing a few months after the death of Charles the Second, complained bitterly, not only that the country attorney and the country apothecary looked down with disdain on the coun try clergyman, but that one of the lessons most earnestly inculcated on every girl of honorable family was to give no encouragement to a lover in orders, and that, if any young lady forgot this precept, she was almost as much disgraced as by an illicit amor. Clarendon, who assuredly bore no ill-will to the church, mentions it as a sign of the confusion of ranks which the great rebellion had produced, that some damsels of noble families had bestowed themselves on divines. A waiting woman was generally considered as the most suit able helpmate for a parson. Queen Elizabeth, as head of the church. had given what seemed to be a formal sanction to this prejudice, by issuing special orders that no clergyman should presume to marry a servant girl, without the consent of her master or mistress. During several generations accordingly the relation between priests and handmaidens was a theme for endless jest; nor would it be easy to find, in the comedy of the seventeenth century, a single instance of a clergyman who wins a spouse above the rank of a cook. Even so late as the time of George the Second, the keenest of all observers of life and manners, himself a priest, remarked that, in a great household, the chaplain was the resource of a lady's maid whose character had had been blown upon, and who was therefore forced to give up hopes of catching the steward. In general the divine who quitted his chaplainship for a benefice and a wife, found that he had only exchanged one class of vexations for another. Not one living in fifty enabled the incumbent to bring up a family comfortably. As children multiplied and grew, the household of the priest became more and more beggarly. Holes appeared more and more plainly in the thatch of his parsonage and in his single cassock. Often it was only by toiling on his glebe, by feeding swine, and by loading dungcarts, that he could obtain daily bread; nor did his utmost exertions always prevent the bailiffs from taking his concordance and his inkstand in execution. It was a white day on which he was admitted into the kitchen of a great house, and regaled * Eachard, Causes of the Contempt of the Clergy; Oldham, Satire to a Friend about to leave the University; Tatler, 255, 258. That the English clergy were a low-born class, is remarked in the travels of the Grand Duke Cosmo. + Roger and Abigail in Fletcher's Scornful Lady, Bull and the Nurse in Vanbrugh's Relapse, Smirk and Susan in Shadwell's Lancashire Witches, are instances. + Swift's Directions to Servants. 222 PICTURES OF MANNERS IN ENGLAND IN THE TIMES OF JAMES II. by the servants with cold meat and ale. His children were brought up like the children of the neighboring peasantry. His boys followed the plough; and his girls went out to service. Study he found impossible; for the advowson of his living would hardly have sold for a sum sufficient to purchase a good theological library; and he might be considered as unusually lucky if he had ten or twelve dog's-eared volumes among the pots and pans on his shelves. Even a keen and strong intellect might be expected to rust in so unfavorable a situation. THE SQUIRE AT HOME. His chief serious employment was the care of his property. He examined samples of grain, handled pigs, and on market days made bargains over a tankard, with drovers and hop merchants. His chief pleasures were commonly derived from field sports and from an unrefined sensuality. His THE SQUIRE IN THE CITY. When the lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet street, he was as easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gaít, his accent, the manner in which he stared at the shops, stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the waterspouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled him into the kennel. Hackney coachmen splashed him from head to foot. Thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman's coat, while he stood entranced by the splendor of the Lord Mayor's show. Moneydroppers, sore from the cart's tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared to him the most honest, friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. Painted women, the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone Park, passed themselves on him for language and pronunciation were such as we should countesses and maids of honor. If he asked his now expect to hear only from the most ignorant way to St. James', his informants sent him to clowns. His oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous Mile End. If he went into a shop, he was instantterms of abuse, were uttered with the broadest ly discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything accent of his province. It was easy to discern, that nobody else would buy, of secondhand emfrom the first words which he spoke, whether broidery, copper rings, and watches that would not he came from Somersetshire or Yorkshire. He go. If he rambled into a fashionable coffee house, troubled himself little about decorating his abode, he became a mark for the insolent derision of fops and, if he attempted decoration, seldom produced and the grave waggery of templars. Enraged and the waiters soon convinced him that he had better too strange to merit a moment's attention; and go somewhere else. Nor, indeed, would he have the evidence upon which it rests is indeed very For anything but deformity. The litter of a farm-yard gathered under the windows of his bed-chamber, and the cabbages and gooseberry bushes grew close to his hall door. His table was loaded with coarse plenty; and guests were cordially welcomed to it. But, as the habit of drinking to excess was general in the class to which he belonged, and as his fortune did not enable him to intoxicate large assemblies daily with claret or canary, strong beer was the ordinary beverage. The quantity of beer consumed in those days was indeed enormous. beer then was to the middle and lower classes, not only all that beer now is, but all that wine, tea, and ardent spirits now are. It was only at great houses, or on great occasions, that foreign drink was placed on the board. The ladies of the house, whose business it had commonly been to cook the repast, retired as soon as the dishes had been devoured, and left the gentlemen to their ale and tobacco. The coarse jollity of the afternoon was often prolonged till the revellers were laid under the table. It was very seldom that the country gentleman caught glimpses of the great world; and what he saw of it tended rather to confuse than to enlighten his understanding. His opinions respecting religion, government, foreign countries, and former times, having been derived, not from study, from observation, or from conversation with enlightened companions, but from such traditions as were current in his own small circle, were the opinions of a child. He adhered to them, however, with the obstinacy which is generally found in ignorant men accustomed to be fed with flattery. His animosities were numerous and bitter. He hated Frenchmen and Italians, Scotchmen and Irishmen, Papists and Presbyterians. Independents and Baptists, Quakers and Jews. Towards London and Londoners he felt an aversion which more than once produced important political effects. His wife and daughter were in tastes and acquirements below a housekeeper or a stillroom maid of the present day. They stitched and spun, brewed gooseberry wine, cured marigolds, and made the crust for the venison pasty. mortified, he soon returned to his mansion, and there, in the homage of his tenants, and the conversation of his boon companions, found consolation for the vexations and humiliations which he had undergone. There he once more felt himself a great man; and he saw nothing above him except when at the assizes he took his seat on the bench near the judge, or when at the muster of the militia he saluted the lord lieutenant. THE COFFEE HOUSE. Foreigners remarked that the coffee house was that which especially distinguished London from all other cities; that the coffee house was the Londoner's house, and that those who wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet street or Chancery Lane. but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow. Nobody was excluded from these places who laid down his penny at the bar. Yet every rank and profession, and every shade of religious and political opinion, had its own head quarters. There were houses near St. James' Park where fops congregated, their heads and shoulders covered with black or flaxen wigs, not less ample than those which are now worn by the chancellor and by the speaker of the house of commons. The wig came from Paris: and so did the rest of the fine gentleman's ornaments, his embroidered coat, his fringed gloves, and the tassel which upheld his pantaloons. The conversation was in that dialect which, long after it had ceased to be spoken in fashionable circles, continued, in the mouth of Lord Foppington, to excite the mirth of theatres. The atmosphere was like that of a perfumer's shop. Tobacco in any other form than that of richly scented snuff was held in abomination. If any clown, ignorant of the usages of the house, called for a pipe, the sneers of the whole assembly, and the short answers of *The chief peculiarity of this dialect was that, in a large class of words, the O was pronounced like A. Thus pronounced stark. See Vanbrugh's Relapse. Lord Sunderland was a great master of this court tune, as Roger North calls it; and Titus Oates affected it in the hope of passing for a fine gentleman. Examen, 77.254. had far to go. For, in general, the coffee rooms reeked with tobacco like a guard room; and strangers sometimes expressed their surprise that so many people should leave their own firesides to sit in the midst of eternal fog and stench. Nowhere was the smoking more constant than at Will's. That celebrated house, situated between Covent Garden and Bow street, was sacred to polite letters. There the talk was about poetical justice and the unities of place and time. There slender. This evidence is, however, uncontradicted by any other; and it will now be laid before the society, with all its qualifications, so as to anticipate all objections, and to present the probability in its simplest expression, reduced to its true value. It will be convenient to begin by showing what is certainly known, and what is not known, of the great Fénélon, during the period which he is here supposed to have spent in America., Many accounts of his life have appeared, of which the most full and authentic is that by Cardinal de Beausset, published at Paris, in 1808, under the title of "History of Fénélon, Archbishop of Cambray, founded upon original manuscripts." This is the standard biography of Fénélon, comprising all that could be discovered respecting him, among faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the ancients. One group debated whether Paradise Lost ought not to have been in rhyme. To another an envious poetaster demonstrated that Venice Preserved ought to have been hooted from the stage. Under no roof was a greater variety of figures to be seen, earls in stars and garters, clergymen in cassocks and bands, pert templars, sheepish lads from the universities, translators and index makers, in ragged coats of frieze. The great press was to get near the chair where his own manuscripts, as well as in the archives of John Dryden sat. In winter that chair was al- the government, in those of the Archbishop of ways in the warmest nook by the fire; in summer | Cambray, and the Seminary of St. Sulspice, and it stood in the balcony. To bow to him and to hear in all other places from which information could his opinion of Racine's last tragedy, or of Bossu's be derived. The work is minute to a fault. Nothtreatise on epic poetry, was thought a privilege. ing connected with its subject is deemed unworthy A pinch from his snuff-box was an honor sufficient to turn the head of a young enthusiast. There were coffee houses where the first medical men might be consulted. Doctor John Radcliffe, who, in the year 1685, rose to the largest practice in London, came daily, when the exchange was full, from his house in Bow street, then a fashionable part of the capital, to Garraway's, and was to be found surrounded by surgeons and apothecaries, at a particular table. There were puritan coffee houses, where no oath was heard, and where lank-haired men discussed election and reprobation through their noses; Jew coffee houses, where dark-eyed money changers from Venice and from Amsterdam greeted each other; and Popish coffee houses, where, as good Protestants believed, Jesuits planned, over their cups, another great fire, and cast silver bullets to shoot the king. From the Literary World. READ BEFORE THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ON THE EVENING OF TUESDAY, THE 5TH OF DE- of insertion, and the dates of each event are given whenever they could be procured, with an exactness which cannot be too highly commended. In this work, particular as it is, no notice appears of any mission undertaken by Fénélon, in America, or in any other country out of France; nor does any other of his biographers give the slightest hint of his having been thus engaged, at any period; nor does anything appear in his writings or his conduct in after life, to countenance such a supposition. According to Cardinal de Beausset, François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénélon, son of the Count de la Mothe Fénélon, was born on the 6th of August, 1651. Being destined from early youth, and apparently by his own choice, for the ecclesiastical profession, he was placed, first at the College du Plessis, where, at the age of fifteen, "he preached a sermon," says his biographer, which had extraordinary success;" and thence, he was soon after transferred to the Theological SemIn the course of my researches, with regard to inary of St. Sulpice, in Paris, under the especial the early discoveries of the French, in the regions direction of M. Tronson, a learned priest, as his of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, I met tutor. Whilst at this institution, in 1667, he conwith some curious statements, involving a proba-ceived the desire to enter, immediately, upon a bility of a nature so interesting, especially to the more active scene; and for the attainment of this citizens of this state, that I venture to communi- object he paid a visit to his uncle and guardian, cate them to the New York Historical Society, the Bishop of Sarlat, after several letters had been which may perhaps consider them not unworthy written to that personage, by himself and by M. Tronson. One of these letters from M. Tronson, of its notice. This probability is no less than that the illus- dated February, 1667, is given at length by Car trious Archbishop Fénélon, one of the best and wisest men whom France or any other country has produced, may have passed some of the years of his youth as a missionary among the Iroquois or Five Nations, in the western part of this state. To those who are acquainted with the life and labors of Fénélon, as exhibited by his numerous biographers, such an announcement may appear dinal de Beausset; the tutor there assures the bishop, that he has done all in his power to divert the youth-then only sixteen years old from his design, but "his inclination is still so strong, and * "Histoire de Fénélon, Archevêque de Cambrai, composée sur les manuscrits originaux." The edition here consulted is in four volumes, 12mo, published at Paris, under the auspices of the Seminary of St. Sulpice, in 1844. The extracts are all from the first volume. his intentions are so entirely disinterested, that I age. Of this whole long interval, comprising an have been obliged to give up the attempt, after interesting portion of his history, no details whatemploying without effect every means in my pow-ever are given. The date of his ordination as a er; considering that such being the character of priest an event of great moment in the life of a his dispositions I was not authorized to do violence churchman, and which would certainly have been to his desire." This letter, though long and devoted to the same subject, gives no information as to the nature of the design on which the young man was so strongly bent, as to render his tutor evidently inclined to consider that he should be allowed to prosecute it. "None of his biographers," writes Cardinal de Beausset, “have thrown any light upon this circumstance in the life of Fénélon. Some original documents have, however, been communicated to us, which seem to so considered by a churchman-is not given; although the cardinal had before him, as he says, "the original register, written by the hands of the different directors of the Seminary of St. Sulpice, marking, day by day, the entrance and the departure of all the ecclesiastics, who had been received at that place between 1641 and 1709," and their register must have been very minute, as from it was derived all the information respecting the desire of Fénélon to devote himself to missions in show that the zeal of Fénélon was then urging Canada. The other biographers of Fénélon place him, notwithstanding his extreme youth, to conse- his ordination in the twenty-fourth year of his age, crate himself to missions in Canada, where the that is, in 1675-6, with the exception of one, Congregation of St. Sulspice maintained a consid-who, without advancing any authority, writes that erable establishment in the Isle of Montreal, for he was ordained at twenty-two, or in 1673-4. the purpose of contributing to the conversion of The canons of the Roman Catholic Church fix the savages, and of procuring the succors of reli- twenty-four as the earliest period at which one gion for the inhabitants of the colony." The can be admitted to the priesthood; though dispencardinal then proceeds to state, that "the Bishop sations are granted-only by the pope for ordiof Sarlat, alarmed with good reason by a determi- nation at an earlier age. As nothing is anywhere nation so absolutely incompatible with the very delicate health of his nephew, refused his consent, and ordered him to return to St. Sulpice, and there to remain until he should have rendered himself, by retirement and study, more worthy of exercising with advantage the ministry to which he believed himself to be specially called." Immediately following what is last extracted from the History of Fénélon, his biographer says: "The Abbé de Fénélon, having received the sacred orders at the Seminary of St. Sulpice, devoted himself to the functions of the holy ministry in the community of the priests of the same parish." After some general reflections on the importance of those functions, we next learn that"He consecrated himself for three entire years to the ecclesiastical ministry, and was then charged by the curate of the parish of St. Sulpice, to explain the Holy Scriptures to the people on Sundays and holidays; a duty which began to make him known, and from the performance of which he himself derived the greatest advantages. Fénélon was summoned to Sarlat in 1674 by his uncle; we have one of his letters, written from Sarlat to the Marquis de Fénélon, [another uncle,] without date, in which he, however, speaks of the death of the Marquis de St. Abrè, his maternal uncle, killed at the battle of Sintzheim, on the 16th of June, 1674, as a very recent event, &c." These are all the particulars which the most minute of the biographies of Fénélon presents respecting his life, during the seven years intervening between his first visit to his uncle, the bishop, in February, 1667, when he was so anxious to go to Canada as a missionary, and 1674, when he again went to see that respected person * Abbé is the general name for secular priests and theological students in France, nearly equivalent to the Euglish parson, but somewhat more comprehensive. said of such a dispensation having been given in Fénélon's case, we are bound to suppose that he was not received as a priest before 1675, which would in consequence have been the commencement of the period of three years, devoted by him to the functions of the ministry in the parish St. Sulpice. In 1675, Fénélon's desire to engage in missions again broke forth, and he determined to repair with that object to Greece: circumstances, however, induced him to remain in France, and in 1686 he was made preceptor to the Duke of Burgundy, the heir apparent to the crown, an ill-conditioned whelp, whom no instructions could raise to the degree of a civilized being. From this painful position he was raised to the Archbishopric of Cambray in 1697; and two years afterwards his Telemaque was published surreptitiously, by the person charged with copying the manuscript, which brought upon its author the hatred of the despot, Louis XIV., a hatred occasionally masked, but constantly subsisting, until the death of Féné lon in 1715. Thus it appears that we have no direct and positive account of the manner in which Fénélon passed the six or seven years immediately follow ing 1667, when he was so ardently desirous to devote himself to missions in Canada; and only from the silence of his biographers can we infer that those years were spent by him in the Seminary of St. Sulpice. Now it is precisely to this interval, from 1667 to 1674, that the evidence applies, which will now be produced, tending to show that Fénélon did actually engage in those missions, and was thus employed, for some time, among the Iroquois, in the western part of the territory now included in the State of New York. * A small Biographical Dictionary, of little value in any way. |