Born: Diego Velasquez,
eminent Spanish artist, 1599, Seville; Pierre
Corneille, French dramatist, 1606, Rouen, Jean
Baptist Languet, 1675, Dijon; Dr. Nathaniel Lardner,
theologian, 1684, Hawkhurst.
Died: Ludovico Giovanni
Ariosto, eminent Italian poet, 1533, Ferrara; Memnon
de Coehorn, eminent engineer, the 'Vauban of
Holland,' 1704, Hague; Louise, Duchess de is Valliere,
mistress of Louis XIV, 1710; George, Lord Anson,
eminent naval commander, circumnavigator, 1762, Moor
Park; Patrick Henry, American patriot and orator,
1799; Jeremy Bentham, writer on legal and political
reforms, 1832, London.
Feast Day: St. Philip
the Deacon, 1st century; St. Gudwall, Bishop of St.
Maloi, confessor, end of 6th or beginning of 7th
century; St. Claude, Archbishop of Besancon,
confessor, 696 or 703; St. Norbert, Archbishop of
Magdeburg, and founder of' the Premonstratensian
Order, confessor, 1134.
JEREMY BENTHAM
The son of a prosperous London
solicitor, Jeremy Bentham was born on the 15th of
February 1748, in Houndsditch �not then the murky and
unsavoury neighbourhood that it is now. With a
dwarfish body and a precocious mind, the boy was
hawked about by his father as an infant prodigy, while
his nursery was crowded with masters in French and
music, drawing and dancing. Determined to lose no time
in making a man of him, the father sent him to
Westminster at eight, to Oxford at twelve, and entered
him at Lincoln's Inn at sixteen. By these hasty
operations the elder Bentham in a great measure
frustrated his own plans. The nervous and feeble city
child, thrown among rough lads, like Cowper conceived
a horror of society, and sought refuge from the
tyranny of his kind in solitary study and meditation.
His prospects at the bar were good; but what between
conscientious scruples about doing as other lawyers
did, and his preference for books over men and money,
it at last became plain to his father that legal
eminence would never be attained by Jeremy; and, after
many struggles, he threw him up as a hopeless
creature, leaving him thence-forth to follow his own
devices.
The young man had in reality a
love for legal studies, but for philosophical ends,
and not as a means of livelihood. His favourite
authors were Montesquieu, Barrington, Beccaria, and
Helve-tins. He had been haunted for a long while by
the question, What is genius? When reading Helvetius,
the etymology of the word suggested to him that it
must mean invention. Helvetius also taught him that
legislation was the most important of all subjects.
Then came the further question, 'Have I a genius for
legislation?' which, after a short course of
self-examination, he tremblingly decided in the
affirmative. From that time forward he devoted himself
more and more exclusively to the reform of
legislation. In 1769, he encountered in a pamphlet of
Dr. Priestley's the phrase, 'The greatest happiness of
the greatest number,' which. he chose for his
lode-star, and identified with his name. He described
himself at this time as 'eeking and picking his way;
getting the better of prejudice and non-sense; making
a little bit of discovery here, another there, and
putting the little bits together.'
In 1776 appeared, anonymously,
his first publication, A Fragment on Government, which
attracted considerable notice, and was attributed to
some of the chief men of the day. In lonely lodgings,
and oppressed with his father's displeasure, 'Mine,'
he writes, 'was a miserable life.' Lord Shelburne,
having discovered the author of the Fragment, called
on Bentham, and invited him to his seat of Bowood.
Visit followed visit, until he became almost
domesticated in Shelburne's family. There he met
congenial society, and was raised,' as he relates, 'from the bottomless pit of
humiliation, and made to
feel that I was something.' Between 1785 and 1787 he
made an extensive tour over Europe, and whilst living
at Kirchoff, in Southern Russia, at the house of his
brother, who was in the service of the Czar, he
produced the celebrated Defence of Usury, one of the
most pleasantly written and conclusively reasoned of
his minor works.
His father dying, he came into
possession of a handsome inheritance, and settled in
Queen Square Place, Westminster, once Milton's house,
where he abode without change until death, for half a
century. His life henceforward was that of a literary
recluse, with habits of the most regular and
persevering industry. His writings were for years
almost completely neglected; and for this the manner
was chiefly to blame. It was through the medium of M.
Dumont's French translations, and that of the higher
class English reviews, that the ideas of Jeremy
Bentham reached the public. He only became tolerable,
only became intelligible, as Sydney Smith remarked,
'after he had been washed, trimmed, shaved, and forced into clean linen.' In
France he first attained
something like popularity. Happening, when in Paris,
in 1825, to enter one of the supreme law courts, he
was recognised, and the whole body of advocates at
once rose to do him reverence, and the judges invited
him to sit beside them.
Bentham stirred very little
abroad, being content to take exercise in his garden;
and it used to be said that he was as surely to be
found at home as Robinson Crusoe on his island. Easily
found at home, it was easier to procure an interview
with the king than with the philosopher. There was
never a man so desirous of shunning others, unless
some strong sense of duty, or prospect of usefulness,
subdued his love of seclusion. Once, when Madame de Stael called on him,
expressing an earnest desire for
an audience, he sent to tell her that he certainly had
nothing to say to her, and he could not see the
necessity of an interview for anything she could have
to say to him. On another occasion, Mr. Edgeworth, in
his somewhat pompous manner, called and delivered this
message to the servant, Tell Mr. Bentham that Mr.
Richard Lovell Edgeworth desires to see him;' to which
he returned for answer, 'Tell Mr. Richard Lovell
Edgeworth that Mr. Bentham does not desire to see
him.'
With the exception of music,
his tastes were all of a grave kind. Living in
Milton's house, he had a slab put up in his garden, 'Sacred to Milton, prince of
poets,' and as a duty once
read his works; but he had no enjoyment of poetry, and
assured young ladies that it was a sad misapplication
of time. Like Franklin in appearance, he made a
curious picture: his white hair, long and flowing, his
neck bare; in a quaker-cut coat, list shoes, and white
worsted stockings drawn over his breeches' knees. In
his garden, in this odd guise, he might be seen
trotting along on what he called his 'ante-prandial
circumgyrations.' Indoors, he dined in his work-room,
where the green window-curtains were pinned over with
slips of paper, being notes taken at the moment of
passing thoughts, to be located and collated at a
future time. This strange hermit was not without
creatures and creations of his own. There was his
stick, Dapple, which he laid on the shoulders of
honoured visitors in friendly knighthood on meet
occasions. There was his sacred tea-pot, Dickey,
regularly set upon a lamp to sing. Last, and not
least, were his favourite cats, chief among whom was
Lang-borne. Him, Bentham boasted he had made a man of.
First he raised him to the dignity of Sir John; but as
he advanced in years he was put into the church, and
as the Rev. Dr. John Langhorne he died.
At the mature age of
eighty-five, with unimpaired intellect, with cheerful
serenity, Bentham died, on the 6th of June 1832. To
his physician and friend, Dr. Southwood Smith, he left
his body for dissection; and three days after his
decease Dr. Smith delivered an oration over it at the
School of Anatomy, Webb Street, Maze Pond.
It would be difficult to
exaggerate the importance of Bentham's labours as a
jurist, and of his services as the instructor of
statesmen and politicians, who, with more practical
faculties, were able to work out the legal reforms he
suggested and devised. At first, when he proposed
changes in the fabric of English law, he was regarded
as a harmless lunatic; as he persisted, he grew into
estimation as a dangerous and sacrilegious madman; and
for long years he wrote and published without gaining
a single influential coadjutor. Towards the close of
his career he became girt about with appreciation and
help of the most useful kind. In 1823, the Westminster
Review, started at his cost and conducted by his
disciples, ably represented him in politics and
literature. Undoubtedly he suffered from the seclusion
in which he lived, and many crotchets he entertained
were bred in his ignorance of human nature.
A knowledge of men is
indispensable for those who would teach or make laws
for them; and to know the world, an author must live
in it, and observe how many circumstances conspire to
defeat the most reasonable expectations and deductions
that can be formed on paper. From the same cause
Bentham's style suffered. His early writings were
terse, clear, and frequently happy in expression; his
later were greatly the reverse. By much living and
thinking alone he had forgot the familiar language of
his kind. Bentham's moral philosophy is constantly
attacked as 'cold-blooded, calculating, selfish;' and
when we consider his prosaic temper, it is not to be
wondered that more ideal spirits should revolt from
the prominence he gives to the material over the
spiritual interests of life; but of his good-will to
mankind, and his earnest wish to promote their
happiness, there can be no question; 'he did what he
could,' and higher praise than this can be accorded to
no one. Universal genius we shall never find in one
man; instead, we attain it in pieces. One man can do
one thing supremely well, and another another. Bentham
did what Wordsworth could not, and Wordsworth what
Bentham could not, and each depreciated the other. Let
us be more catholic than either, and try to honour the
eminent services of both, and never erect our peculiar
likings, necessarily narrow and imperfect, into a
standard of universal judgment.
EDWARD III OF ENGLAND AND PHILIP VI OF FRANCE�QUARREL
ABOUT HOMAGE
The claim of one sovereign for
homage from another, on account of a superiority over
certain parts of that other's dominions, was surely
not the wisest institution of the Middle Ages. It does
not seem to have ever been a clear claim in any case,
and as far as it could be substantiated at all, it was
liable to be stretched so far as to excite hostile
resistance. England was but just emerged from a long
war with Scotland, arising from an overstretched claim
over its monarch, when its own kings were plunged into
one of a century long, in consequence of a similar
claim over themselves on the part of the French
monarch.
When Philip the Sixth had made
good his somewhat questionable pretensions to the
French throne, he lost no time in summoning Edward III
of England to come and pay homage as a vassal for
Guienne. The latter, who through his mother claimed
the whole French empire, refused an audience to the
ambassadors, and sent word that the son of a king
would not bow before the son of a count. Fresh envoys
were despatched, to inform him that his fiefs and
revenues would be seized if he persisted in his
refusal; and as a war would at that time have been
extremely inconvenient, Edward yielded to the advice
of his peers, and wrote respectfully to Philip, 'that
he had long intended to visit France to acquit himself
of his debt; and that, all obstacles being now
removed, he should shortly cross over.'
The 6th of June 1329 was the
day fixed for the monarchs to meet at the cathedral of
Amiens, and the grandeur which Edward displayed in his
own dress and that of his followers made it evident
that he was more anxious to parade his power and
riches than to honour Philip. He wore a robe of
Cramoisy velvet spotted with gold leopards, the crown
on his head, the sword at his side, and gold spurs;
three bishops, four counts, six barons, and forty
noble knights were in his train. Philip, on his side,
had forgotten nothing to render the ceremony as
pompous as possible. He was seated on a superb throne,
dressed in a long robe of violet velvet, spotted with
gold ileums-de-Ns; his diadem set with precious
stones, and holding a golden sceptre in his hand. The
kings of Navarre, Bohemia, and Majorca stood by his
side, with dukes, counts, and church dignitaries in
abundance. Edward himself was struck with the
magnificence of this numerous and brilliant entourage;
on his return to England, when his queen questioned
him about the king her uncle, he was never weary of
speaking 'of the great state and honour in France, to
which no other kingdom could be compared.'
As soon as Edward had
approached the throne, the high chamberlain commanded
him to take off his crown, his sword, and spurs, and
to kneel before the king on a cushion that was
prepared �a most humiliating ceremony for so proud a
spirit; he, however, obeyed, having advanced too far
to recede, but all present remarked the indignation
depicted on his face, to see himself forced to so
lowly an attitude before such illustrious witnesses.
The same officer then said, 'Sire, you must, as Count
de Guienne, pay liege homage to monseigneur the king,
and promise him faith and loyalty.' Here all Edward's
pride was awakened, he declared he did not owe liege
homage; both sides disputed the question warmly; at
length, on his promising to consult his archives as
soon as he returned to England, to know exactly to
what he was pledged, and to send the declaration,
sealed with the great seal, they lot him off in these
general terms: 'Sire,' said the chamberlain, 'you are
the vassal of the King of France for Guienne and its
appurtenances, which you hold of him as peer of
France, according to the form of peace made between
his predecessors and yours, as you and your ancestors
have done for the same duchy to former kings.' To
which Edward replied, 'Voire,' the old French word for
yes. 'If it be so,' replied the Viscount de Melun,
'the king, our sire, receives you under protest.' The
French monarch said, 'Voire,' and kissed the King of
England on his mouth, holding his hands in his own.
Thus ended a ceremony which enraged Edward so much
that he swore eternal hatred to the prince who had
treated him with so much haughtiness.
On his return to England he
was in no haste to make the required search, but the
Duke de Bourbon and other nobles were sent to this
country to receive a formal and authentic declaration.
The French jurisconsults, who accompanied them, spent
much time with the English parliament in examining
previous acts of homage, and it was proved that the
king was liege man in his rank of Duke of Guienne. The
necessary papers were sent to Philip, and Edward never
rested until he had prepared the army which was to
attack France, and begin that fearful war which lasted
above a century.
THE
MOHOCKS
On the 6th of June 1712, Sir
Mark Cole and three other gentlemen were tried at the
Old Bailey for riot, assault, and beating the watch. A
paper of the day asserts that these were 'Mohocks,
that they had attacked the watch in Devereux Street,
slit two persons' noses, cut a woman in the arm with a
penknife so as to disable her for life, rolled a woman
in a tub down Snow Hill, misused other women in a
barbarous manner by setting them on their heads, and
overset several coaches and chairs with short clubs,
loaded with lead at both ends, expressly made for the
purpose. In their defence, the prisoners denied that
they were Mohocks, alleging that they were 'Scourers,' and had gone out, with a
magistrate's
sanction, to scour the streets, arrest Mohocks and
other offenders, and deliver them up to justice.
On
the night in question they had attacked a notorious
gambling-house, and taken thirteen men out of it.
While engaged in this meritorious manner, they learned
that the Mohocks were in Devereux Street, and on
proceeding thither found three men desperately
wounded, lying on the ground; they were then attacked
by the watch, and felt bound to defend themselves. As
an instance of the gross misconduct of the watch, it
was further alleged that they, the watch, had on the
same, night actually presumed to arrest a peer of the
realm, Lord Hitchinbroke, and had latterly adopted the
practice of going their rounds by night accompanied by
savage dogs. The jury, however, in spite of this
defence, returned a verdict of ' guilty;' and the
judge fined the culprits in the sum of three shillings
and four-pence each.
It is scarcely credible that,
so late as the last century, a number of young men of
rank and fashion, assuming the name of a savage tribe,
emulated their barbarous actions by wantonly
inflicting the most disgusting cruelties on the
peaceable inhabitants, particularly women, of London.
And after these Mohocks, as they styled themselves,
had held the town in terror for two years, after a
royal proclamation had offered �100 reward for the
apprehension of any one of them, when these four
persons were at last brought to justice, the amount of
punishment inflicted was merely the paltry fine of 3s.
4d.
Gay
thus alludes to the Mohocks, and this very trial, in his Trivia:
'Who has not heard the
Scourers' midnight fame?
Who has not trembled at the Mohocks' name?
Was there a watchman took his hourly rounds,
Safe from their blows or new-invented wounds?
I pass their desperate deeds and mischief done,
Where from Snow Hill black steepy torrents run;
How matrons, hooped within the hogshead's womb,
Are tumbled furious thence: the rolling tomb
O'er the stones thunders, bounds from side to
side�
So Regulus, to save his country, died.'
One of the miscellaneous
publications, issued by the circle of wits that
revolved round
Pope and Swift, is entitled, An
Argument, proving from History, Reason, and Scripture,
that the present Race of Mohocks and Hawke-bites are
the Goy and Magog mentioned in the Revelations; and
therefore that this vain and transitory World will
shortly be brought to its final Dissolution. Written
by a reverend Divine, who took it from the Mouth of
the Spirit of a Person who was slain by the Mohocks.
The 'Spirit' introduces
himself by saying, 'I am the porter that was
barbarously slain in Fleet Street. - By the Mohocks
and Hawkubites was I slain, when they laid violent
hands upon me. They put their hook into my mouth, they
divided my nostrils asunder, they sent me, as they
thought, to my long home; but now I am returned again
to foretell their destruction.' When the Spirit
disappears, the assumed reverend author sings:
'From Mohock and from
Hawkubite,
Good Lord, deliver me!
Who wander through the streets at night,
Committing cruelty.
They slash our sons with bloody knives,
And on our daughters fall;
And if they murder not our wives,
We have good luck withal
Coaches and chairs they overturn,
Nay, carts most easily;
Therefore from Gog and Magog,
Good Lord, deliver me!'
WILLIAM HUNNIS
On the 6th of June 1597, died
William Hunnis, chapel-master to Queen Elizabeth, and
previously Gentleman of the Chapel under Edward the
Sixth. Hunnis was a rhymester�we cannot call him a
poet�as well as a musician; and according to his last
will and testament, thus written in metre by himself,
he experienced the once proverbial poverty of the
rhyming race:
To God my soul I do
bequeath, because it is his own,
My body to be laid in grave, where, to my friends
best known
Executors I will none make, thereby great strife may
grow,
Because the goods that I shall leave will not pay
all I owe.'
Immediately after the
Reformation a very general spirit for versifying the
Psalms and other parts of Scripture prevailed in
England. Hunnis, not the least idle of those
versifiers, published several collections, under
quaint titles, now worth far more than their weight in
gold to the bibliomaniacs. Seven Sobs of a Sorrowful
Soul for Sin, comprehending the seven penitential
psalms in metre, was dedicated to Frances, Countess of
Sussex, the foundress of Sydney-Sussex College at
Oxford. Under the happy title of A Handful of
Honeysuckles, he published Blessings out of
Deuteronomie, Prayers and Meditations, in metre, with
musical notes. His spiritual nosegays were numerous,
to say nothing of his Recreations on Adam's
Banishment, the Lost Sheep, and other similar topics;
he turned the whole book of Genesis into rhyme, under
the title of A Hiveful of Honey.
Christopher Tye, a
contemporary of Hunnis, and organist to Queen
Elizabeth, rendered the Acts of the Apostles into
English verse, and having set them to music, they were
sung in the Chapel Royal, but never became popular.
The impropriety of the design, as well as the
infelicity of its execution, was perceived even in
that undiscerning age. Of the Acts, as versified by
Tye, the initial stanzas of the fourteenth chapter may
be selected as the least offensive for a specimen:
'It chanced in Iconium,
As they oft' times did use,
Together they into did come
The synagogue of Jews,
Where they did preach, and only seek
God's grace them to achieve;
That so they speak, to Jew and Greek,
That many did believe.'
The early Puritans violently
opposed the study of the classics, or the reading of
transla, tions from them, asserting that the customary
mode of training youths in the Roman poets encourages
idolatry and pagan superstition; their employing
themselves so zealously in rendering the Bible into
English metre was that it might serve as 'a substitute
for the ungodliness of the heathens.' A favourite book
for those versifiers was the Song of Solomon, of which
many versions were made. One, entitled Sion's Muse, is
thus alluded to in a satire of Bishop Hall, written in
ridicule of the spiritual poetry with which the age
was inundated. After mentioning several of these
productions, the nervous though inelegant satirist
adds:
Yea, and the prophet of the
heavenly lyre, Great Solomon, sings in the English
choir; And is become a new found sonnetist, Singing
his love, the holy spouse of Christ: Like as she were
some light-skirts of the rest, In mightiest
inkhornisms he can thither wrest. Ye Sion Muses shall
by my dear will, For this your zeal and far-admired
skill, Be straight transported from Jerusalem, Unto
the holy house of Bethlehem.'
Robert Wisdome, archdeacon of
Ely, was also one of those versifiers; but he is
chiefly memorable for a metrical prayer, intended to
be sung in churches, against the Pope and Turk, of
whom he had conceived most alarming apprehensions. As
there is no stanza in this prayer which could be
considered unprofane at the present day, it is
impossible to quote it. Among other wits, however,
the facetious Bishop Corbet
has happily ridiculed it.
Supposing himself seized with a sudden impulse to hear
or to write a puritanical hymn, he invokes the ghost
of Wisdome, as the most skilful poet in this mode of
composition, to come and assist him. But he advises
Wisdome to steal back again to his tomb in Carfax
Church, at Oxford, silent and unperceived, for fear of
being discovered and intercepted by the terrible Pope
or Turk. The epigram is as follows:
'To THE GHOST OF
ROBERT WISDOME
Thou, once a body, now but
air,
Arch-botcher of a psalm or prayer,
From Carfax come!
And patch us up a zealous lay,
With an old ever and for aye,
Or all and some.
Or such a spirit lend me,
As may a hymn down send me,
To purge my brain;
But, Robert, look behind thee,
Lest Turk or Pope do find thee,
And go to bed again.'
