Born: Princess Augusta
of Brunswick, 1737.
Died: Ignatius Loyola,
founder of the Jesuits, 1556, Rome; Charles de Gontaut,
Due de Biron, favourite commander of Henri IV,
beheaded in the Bastile, 1602; Martin Harpertzoon Van
Tromp, Dutch admiral, killed in an engagement near
Texel, 1653; John V, king of Portugal, 1750; Denis Diderot, French
encyclopaedist, 1784, Paris; William
T. Lowndes, bibliographer, 1843.
Feast Day: St. Helen of
Skofde, in Sweden, martyr, about 1160. St. John
Columbini, confessor, founder of the order of the
Jesuati, 1367. St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the
Society of Jesus, 1556.
IGNATIUS LOYOLA
Ignatius Loyola, 'a Spanish
soldier and hidalgo with hot Biscayan blood,' was, in
1521, assisting in the defence of Pampeluna against
the French, when a cannon-ball fractured his right leg
and a splinter injured his left. He was carried to the
neighbouring castle of Loyola, and in the weary months
during which he lay stretched upon his couch, he tried
to while away the time in reading the Lives of the
Saints. He was only thirty; he had a strong and
vehement will; he had led a wild and vicious life; and
had burned for military glory. As it was evident that
for him henceforward the part of the soldier was
barred, the question arose, Why might he not be a
saint, and rival St. Francis and
St. Dominic?
He
decided to try. He tore himself from his kindred and
friends, and made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In
the church of the Virgin at Mount Serrat, he hung up
his arms, and vowed constant obedience to God and the
church. Dressed as a beggar, and in the practice of
the severest austerities, he reached Jerusalem on the
4th of September 1523. On his return to Spain, at the
age of thirty-three, he resumed his education, which
had been neglected from childhood, and laboriously
from the rudiments of grammar worked his way through a
full university course, making no secret of his
ignorance. The rigour of his life, and the rebukes he
administered to lax ecclesiastics, not unfrequently
brought him into trouble as a Pharisaic meddler.
He went to Paris in 1528, and
at the university he made the acquaintance of Xavier,
Faber, Lainez, Bobadilla, and Rodriguez, five students
whom he inspired with his own devout fervour. In an
underground chapel of the church of Montmartre, on the
15th of August 1534, the six enthusiasts took the
solemn vows of celibacy, poverty, and the devotion of
their lives to the care of Christians, and the
conversion of infidels. Such was the beginning of the
famous Society of Jesus.
The plan of the new order was
laid before Pope Paul III, who raised several
objections to it; but, on the engagement that Jesuits
should in all matters yield implicit obedience to the
holy see, he granted them a constitution in a bull,
dated the 27th of September 1540. Loyola was elected
president, and was established at Rome as director of
the movements of the society. Very opportunely did the
Jesuits come to the service of the popedom. Unhampered
by the routine of other ecclesiastical orders, they
undertook services for which they alone were fit; and,
as sharp-shooters and skirmishers, became the most
annoying and dangerous antagonists of Protestantism.
To a certain freedom of action the Jesuit united the
advantages of perfect discipline; obedience was his
primary duty. He used his faculties, but their action
was controlled by a central authority; every command
had to be wrought out with all his skill and energy,
without questioning, and at all hazards. It was the
aim of the society to discover and develop the
peculiar genius of all its members, and then to apply
them to the aggrandizement of the church. Soon the
presence of the new order, and the fame of its
missionaries, spread throughout the world, and
successive popes gladly increased the numbers and
enlarged the privileges of the society. Loyola brought
more ardour than intellect to the institution of
Jesuitism. The perfection of its mechanism, which
Cardinal Richelieu pronounced a master-piece of
policy, was due to James Lainez, who succeeded Loyola
as president.
Worn out with labours and
privations, Loyola died on the 31st of July 1556, aged
sixty-five. He was canonised as a saint in 1622, and
his festival is celebrated on the 31st of July.
An original autograph of the
founder of the order of Jesus is subjoined�taken from
his signature to a document, dated 1554, preserved in
the public library of the city of Treves, on the
Moselle.
TWO LOVERS
KILLED BY LIGHTNING
It was on the 31st of July
1718, that the affecting incident occurred to which
Pope, Gay,
and Thomson severally adverted�the
instantaneous killing of two rustic lovers by a
lightning stroke. At Stanton-Harcourt, about nine
miles west of Oxford, are the remains of a very old
mansion, belonging to the family of the Harcourts,
consisting chiefly of a domestic chapel in a tower,
and two or three rooms over it. Pope spent two summers
in this old building, with the hearty assent of the
Harcourts, who had been lords of the manor for more
than seven hundred years. One room, in which he
finished the Fifth Book of his Iliad, obtained, on
that account, the name of 'Pope's Study.' Gay often
visited him there; and it is in one of Gay's letters
that the catastrophe, which occurred in a neighbouring
field, is thus narrated: 'John Hewit was a well-set
man of about twenty-five. Sarah Drew might be called
comely rather than beautiful, and was about the same
age. They had passed through the various labours of
the year together with the greatest satisfaction.
Their love was the talk of the whole neighbourhood,
for scandal never affirmed that they had other views
than the lawful possession of each other in marriage.
It was that very morning that
they had obtained the consent of her parents; and it
was but till the next week that they had to wait to be
happy. Perhaps in the interval of their work they were
talking of their wedding clothes, and John was suiting
several sorts of poppies and wild-flowers to her
complexion, to choose her a hat for the wedding-day.
While they were thus busied (it was between two and
three o'clock in the afternoon), the clouds grew
black, and such a storm of lightning and thunder
ensued, that all the labourers made the best of their
way to what shelter the trees and hedges afforded.
Sarah was frighted, and fell down in a swoon on a heap
of barley; John, who never separated from her, having
raked together two or three heaps, the better to
secure her from the storm. Immediately after was heard
so loud a crash as if the heavens had split asunder.
Every one was now solicitous
for the safety of his neighbour, and they called to
one another throughout the field. No answer being
returned to those who called to our lovers, they
stepped to the place where they lay. They perceived
the barley all in a smoke, and then spied the faithful
pair; John, with one arm about Sarah's neck, and the
other held over her, as if to screen her from the
lightning. They were struck dead, and stiffened in
this tender posture. Sarah's left eye was injured, and
there appeared a black spot on her breast. Her lover
was all over black; but not the least sign of life was
found in either. Attended by their melancholy
companions, they were conveyed to the town, and next
day were interred in Stanton-Harcourt churchyard.'
Pope, whether or not he was at
Stanton-Harcourt at the time, soon afterwards wrote an
epitaph on the hapless young couple:
ON
TWO LOVERS STRUCK DEAD BY LIGHTNING
'When eastern lovers feed
the funeral fire,
On the same pile the faithful pair expire:
Here pitying heav'n, that virtue mutual found,
And blasted both, that it might neither wound.
Hearts so sincere th' Almighty saw well pleased,
Sent his own lightning, and the victims seized.'
'Lord Harcourt,' says Mr.
Robert Carruthers, in his edition of Pope, 'on whose
estate the unfortunate pair lived, was apprehensive
that the country-people would not understand the
above, and Pope wrote the subjoined:
'NEAR THIS
PLACE LIE THE BODIES
OF JOHN HEWIT AND SARAH DREW,
AN INDUSTRIOUS YOUNG MAN
AND VIRTUOUS YOUNG MAIDEN OF THIS PARISH;
WHO, BEING AT HARVEST-WORK
(WITH SEVERAL OTHERS),
WERE IN ONE INSTANT KILLED BY LIGHTNING,
THE LAST DAY OF JULY 1713.
Think not, by
rigorous judgment seized,
A pair so faithful could expire;
Victims so pure Heav'n saw well pleased,
And snatch'd them in eternal lire.
Live well,
and fear no sudden fate;
When God calls victims to the grave,
Alike 'tis justice soon or late,
Mercy alike to kill or save,
Virtue
unmov'd can hear the call,
And face the flash that melts the ball.'
This second epitaph was
engraved on a stone in the parish church of
Stanton-Harcourt.
Thomson appears to have had
this incident in his view when he wrote the Seasons,
about nineyears afterwards. The fifty lines (in
'Summer') beginning
'Young Celadon
And his Amelia were a matchless pair,'
relate an episode of the same
character as the sad story of John Hewit and Sarah
Drew, with the exception that the poet kills the
maiden but not the lover.
TESTIMONIALS TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY YEARS AGO
The following present made to
the new recorder of Nottingham, 1603 A. D., by order
of the Hall, affords a curious instance of the taste
and habit of the times, in respect to what are now
dignified by the name of Testimonials. 'It is agreed
that the town shall, on Wednesday next, present the
recorder, Sir Henry Pierrepont, with a sugar-loaf,
9s.; lemons, 1s. 8d.; white wine, one gallon, 2s. 8d.;
claret, one gallon, 2s. 8d.; muskadyne, one pottle,
2s. 8d.; sack, one pottle, 2s.; total 20s. 8d.'
Another testimonial was
presented by the same town, in the year following, the
object of public admiration and bounty in this
instance being no less a personage than the Earl of
Shrewsbury. Of course the present, intended to convey
to his lordship the sense entertained by the burgesses
of his high worth and character, must be of a more
weighty description than that bestowed on the
recorder. Accordingly, it was ordered that 'a veal, a
mutton, a lamb, a dozen of chickens, two dozen of
rabbits, two dozen of pigeons, and four capons, should
be presented to his lordship.'
Ours is a day beyond all
others for the presentation of Testimonials, but we
have never yet heard of a celebrity of the nineteenth
century being invited to a public meeting to receive
from his friends a testimonial of their esteem, and
then having laid at his feet sundry bottles of wine,
with sugar and lemons to flavour it; or a good fat
calf, a weddersheep, and a lamb of a year old, with
dozens of chickens and rabbits to garnish the same, as
appears to have been the favourite course with our
'good-living' ancestors.
PARTRIDGE, THE
ALMANAC-MAKER
Partridge, the almanac-maker,
of whom mention is made in the article on 'Written and
Printed Almanacs', has been so
fortunate as to be embalmed in one of the most
pleasing poems in the English language�Pope's Rape of
the Locks With a consummation of surprising power and
appropriate character, the poet, after the robbery of
Belinda's ' wavy curl' has been effected, proceeds to
place the stolen object among the constellations. The
poem says:
'This the beau-monde shall
from the Mall survey,
And hail with music its propitious ray
This the blest lover shall for Venus take,
And send up prayers from Rosamunda's lake;
This PARTRIDGE soon shall view in cloudless skies,
When next he looks through Galileo's eyes;
And hence the egregious wizard shall foredoom,
The fate of Louis and the fall of Rome.'
It is strange how sometimes
the most worthless of men, as regards posterity, are
handed down to fame for the very qualities which it
might be hoped would be left in oblivion. What
sacrifices would many a sage or poet have made, to be
connected with all time through Pope and the charming
Belinda? Yet here, in this case, we find the
almanac-making shoe-maker enjoying a companionship and
a celebrity for qualities which, morally, have no
virtue or endurance in them, but quite the reverse.
