fest any agitation, or whether the blood flowed from it before him. Scribonius advances his own testimony in corroboration of the success of this test. A nobleman of Arles, whom he names, had been mortally wounded. Blood burst from the wound and from the nostrils after decease, immediately on approach of the offender. Hippolytus of Marseilles declared his incredulity until a murder was committed by a person unknown during his magistracy of a town in Italy. He directed the body to be brought to him, and summoned the attendance of all suspected persons. The wounds began to bleed on the approach of the real murderer, who soon after confessed the fact. Matthæus, however, considers the test so fallacious as to be an insufficient reason for putting one suspected to torture for eliciting the truth. Carpzovius, also, another lawyer of repute, relates that it was established, from proof transmitted to his court, that a corpse had bled before an innocent person, though not a drop of blood escaped before the guilty. Nevertheless he had not considered the bleeding of a wound or of the nostrils enough to warrant the application of torture. Murdered man. Keats, in his "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," has a daring phrase: Then the two brothers and their murdered man The man had not yet been murdered, but this anticipatory glance at his fate snatches a grace beyond the reach of mere logic. The same cannot be said of a mistake by Lord Macaulay,—a mistake all the more remarkable because it echoes one made by Robert Montgomery in a passage which has other points of similarity. Montgomery is to-day remembered only as the victim of one of Macaulay's slashing criticisms. The reviewer has this in his "Battle of Lake Regillus :" And louder still and louder Rose from the darkened field The reviewed had already written thus: Spirit of Light and Life! When Battle rears Roll the dread notes of anguish and despair; And hear'st each groan that gurgles from the slain. It is possible that the subject of battle may by its intensity create similarity of description, but the double likeness in these quotations gives the inevitable inference of conscious or unconscious imitation. As to the bull, it is more vehement in Macaulay than in Montgomery. It reminds one of Dr. Johnson, -though he meant a deliberate conceit, and of Dryden,— Nor yet perceived the vital spirit fled, But still fought on, nor knew that he was dead, Soothed with the sound, the king grew vain; And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain. Music of her face. In "The Bride of Abydos" Byron thus describes Zuleika the bride, who is not a bride, after all, save in the paulo-post-future tense: Around her shone The nameless charms unmark'd by her alone; The light of love, the purity of grace, The mind, the music breathing from her face, The heart whose softness harmonized the whole,- In the third line there seems to be a reminiscence of Gray's "the purple light of love" (Progress of Poesy). The figure in the second has many predecessors. Lucasta, whom Lovelace celebrates as his Eurydice in his song of "Orpheus to Beasts," was a maiden whose charms were singularly like Zuleika's: Sir Thomas Browne tells us, in his "Religio Medici," that he was himself never yet once married, and commends their resolution who never marry twice. Yet he is naturally amorous, as he afterwards confesses, of all that is fair: There is music in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument; for there is music wherever there is harmony, order, or proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres.-Religio Medici, Part II., Sec. 9. 66 Music of the Spheres. The notion of the starry hosts emitting harmonies as they swing through space is as old almost as the Patriarchs, and its origin is undoubtedly Oriental, probably Sabæan. "The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy," we read in Job xxxviii. 7. The Pythagoreans imported the idea into the Hellenic world, and according to their philosophy the seven wandering stars"-i.e., the five primary planets known to the ancients, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and the Sun and Moon-were each attuned to a note in the harmonic scale and sounded in accord as they moved through space. Maximus Tyrius, a Hellenized Syrian, says that "the mere proper motion of the planets must create sounds, and as they move in space at regular intervals the sounds must harinonize." Shakespeare gives the thought exquisite expression : There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st, But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims. Merchant of Venice, Act v., Sc. 1. Goethe's archangels, chanting anthem-wise about The Throne of the glory of God's works, open his great drama of the universe, Gabriel beginning,The sun-orb sings, in emulation, 'Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round: His path predestined through Creation Faust: Prologue in Heaven. The following is Milton's embodiment of the fancy : Ring out, ye crystal spheres, If ye have power to touch our senses so; Move in melodious time, And let the bass of heaven's deep organ blow; And with your ninefold harmony Make up full concert to the angelic symphony. Ode on the Nativity. Plato's notion is that a siren sits on each planet, who carols a sweet song, agreeing to the motion of her own particular star, but harmonizing with the others. These singing sirens reappear in Milton: It would be impossible within reasonable limits to quote the numerous references to the supposed celestial music. The following from Wordsworth embodies the original simile: And every motion of his starry train Of music, audible to him alone. The Triad. In Collins the siren of Plato has descended to earth, and he apostrophizes her thus: O Music! sphere-descended maid! The Passions, 1. 95. Mute inglorious Milton. The fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth stanzas of Gray's "Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard" run as follows: Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood, The applause of listening senates to command, To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land, And read their history in a nation's eyes, Their lot forbade, nor circumscribed alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined; The thought in these lines is obvious enough. Indeed, it is but a more literal statement of the metaphorical figure in the two preceding stanzas, which we have already shown (see GEM-FLOWER) to have been frequently anticipated. But the very form of the expression may be traced through curious ramifications back to a very unlikely source in Cowley's "Davideis." The poet is laboring to impress upon us the bottomlessness of the bottomless abyss. It is, he says, Beneath the dens where unflecht tempests lie, Dryden seized upon this passage and turned it into ridicule in his "MacFlecknoe:" A nursery erects its head, Where queens are formed, and future heroes bred; Where unfledged actors learn to laugh and cry, Shenstone saw in this parody the germ of a serious idea, which he thus expresses in his "School-Mistress :" Nursed with skill, what dazzling fruits appear! E'en now sagacious foresight points to show And there a chancellor in embryo, Or bard sublime, if bard may e'er be so, As Milton, Shakespeare, names that ne'er shall die! Whereupon Gray turned it to immortal use in the above stanzas. Another coincidence has been pointed out between the third line of the fifteenth stanza and a passage in the "Mystery of the Good Old Cause" (1660), p. 11, reprinted by the Aungervyle Society, May, 1883, where Oliver Cromwell is referred to as one who "having projected greatness and sovereignty to himself from the beginning, he waded to it through the blood of his natural prince and great numbers of his fellow-subjects.” But we have not yet done with Cowley's couplet. Young takes hold of it in his "Night Thoughts" and bids us "elance our thought" above the caves Where infant tempests wait their growing wings, And surely it was from the same font of inspiration that Byron drew his line in "Childe Harold" where he describes the glee of the mountains during a storm on Lake Leman : As if they did rejoice at a young earthquake's birth. As to Dryden's parody, Mrs. Barbauld, as well as Shenstone, took it seriously and transferred it to her rhymes addressed to some grammar-school : Its modest front it rears, A nursery of men for future years; Here infant bards and embryo statesmen lie, And unfledged poets short excursions try. Muttons, Let us return to our, in other words, let us recur to the subject-matter from which we have wandered. The sentence comes from the old French play "L'Avocat Patelin," by Blanchet. Guillaume, a draper, has been robbed by Pathelin, a lawyer, of six ells of cloth, and by Agnelet, his shepherd, of twenty-six sheep. Guillaume intends to make it a hanging-matter for the shepherd, but when he comes into court to accuse him he finds that Pathelin, who stole the cloth, is the lawyer employed to defend Agnelet. With his head running upon both his sheep and his cloth, he makes a delightful confusion of the two losses. The judge says,— Sus, revenons à nos moutons : Qu'en fut-il? and the draper replies, Il en a pris six aunes, De neuf francs. The judge is much puzzled, and continually entreats Guillaume, "Let us return to our sheep" ("Revenons à nos moutons"). Mutual Admiration Society, a satirical term popularly applied to any circle of private or public individuals who express what seems to be undue appreciation of each other, or especially who practise what is now known as log-rolling. There is much truth, however, in Dr. Holmes's protest. He makes his Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table give this reply to a question as to whether he belongs to a Mutual Admiration Society: "I blush to say that I do not at this present moment. I once did, however. It was the first association to which I ever heard the term applied; a body of scientific young men in a great foreign city who admired their teacher, and to some extent each other. Many of them deserved it; they have become famous since." In a note to the last edition of the "Autocrat" Dr. Holmes explains that this body "was the Société d'Observation Médicale of Paris, of which M. Louis was president, and MM. Barth, Grisotte, and our own Dr. Bowditch were members. About the time when these papers were published," he continues, "the Saturday Club was founded, or, rather, found itself in existence without any organization, almost without parentage. It was natural enough that such men as Emerson, Longfellow, Agassiz, Peirce, with Hawthorne, Motley, Sumner, when within reach, and others who would be good company for them, should meet and dine together once in a while, as they did, in point of fact, every month, and as some who are still living, with other and newer members, still meet and dine. If some of them had not admired each other they would have been exceptions in the world of letters and science." But the term was known in America before the establishment of the Saturday Club. It was applied by newspaper humorists to a friendly circle self-styled the "Five of Clubs" which George S. Hillard, Henry R. Cleveland, Professor C. C. Felton, Charles Sumner, and H. W. Longfellow established at Cambridge in 1836. The point of the jest lay in the fact that as literary men they all had good chances, of which they liberally and righteously availed themselves, to speak well of each other's books in the Reviews. After Cleveland's early death Dr. S. G. Howe, the philanthropist, became one of the club. Mutual friend, a modern substitute for common friend, which has established itself despite the protests of purist and pedagogue. Thus, Harrison, in his "Choice of Books," says, "In D'Israeli's 'Lothair' a young lady talks to the hero about their mutual ancestors. . . . One used to think that mutual friend for common friend was rather a cockneyism. Mutual, as Johnson will tell us, means something reciprocal, a giving and taking. How could people have mutual ancestors, unless, indeed, their great-grandparents had exchanged husbands or wives?" The same fault was one of the many which Macaulay denounced in his review of Croker's "Boswell's Johnson” in 1831: "We find in every page words used in wrong senses, and constructions which violate the plainest rules of grammar. We have the vulgarism of mutual friend for common friend." Nevertheless, from the beginning of the seventeenth century this "vulgarism" has been forcing itself into favor. Its earliest reported appearance is in Ned Ward's "Wandering Spy," Part II., p. 56, edition of 1722 (but that, of course, is a work of no linguistic authority): At once quite banishing away Sir Walter Scott is much better authority. Writing to Messrs. Hurst, Robinson & Co., February 25, 1822, he refers to "our mutual friend Mr. James Ballantyne" (CONSTABLE: Memoirs). And at last came Dickens in 1864 and boldly took the tabooed phrase as the very title of a novel, so that now it is stamped so indelibly upon the English language that all the brooms of all the Partingtonian critics will never suffice to wash out the hallmark. Myself, That excellent man is. Charles Mathews, the comedian, was once placed in the awkward position of proposing his own health at a banquet where he doubled the parts of host and guest upon taking leave of his friends before starting for the antipodes. But his ready wit always extricated him from the most awkward positions, and with excellent humor he justified his novel position on the ground that he was naturally the fittest man to propose the toast of the evening: "I venture emphatically to affirm there is no man so well acquainted with the merits and demerits of that gifted individual as I am. I have been on the most intimate terms with him from his earliest youth. I have watched over and assisted his progress from childhood upwards, have shared in all his joys and griefs; and I am proud to have this opportunity of publicly declaring that there is not a man on earth for whom I entertain so sincere a regard and affection. Indeed, I don't think I go too far in stating that he has an equal affection for me. He has come to me for |