in Peg's uncouth body the soul of a gentlewoman, | pliances fail, and sickness come to her, as it together with that rare quality of rising, which, comes to all, God forbid I should ever forget that in spite of circumstances, enables many refined she and I are alike his children. minds to reach their natural level-if so, I shall not have the slightest objection to assist that desirable end in every possible way. Nay, even finally, it would be rather a pleasure to me some day to sit at table with Miss Margaret Thompson; and I would altogether scorn the behavior of that fine gentleman who once "cut" honest Dodsley the publisher-footman-of whom the meek old fellow only observed: "Yes, he knows me; I used to wait behind his chair." You suppose, I dare say, Mrs. Smith, that it is against you that Emma or Betsey sins when she mimics your satins and laces in flimsy silk or cotton blonde; or, going a step further, actually flaunts in the very same materials you wear? not a bit of it; no more than if you were to purchase the same Cashmere shawl as Her Grace the Duchess of Sutherland. Certainly you might; you would harm nobody-except yourself. So, whenever your maid-servant errs in buying unBut since the laws of nature and of circum- meet finery, she errs against herself; lowers her stance have made me a mistress, and my servants, own self-respect, and the honest dignity of her servants; have given me incalculable opportuni-position, by trying to appear what she is not; ties of becoming their superior-Heaven knows wastes in shabby showiness the money which whether I am or no !-the only way in which I ought to be laid up against old age; loses the can prove this fact, and profit by it, is by trying simple neatness of the serving-maid, and becomes to realize the proverb, that a good mistress can ridiculous as the sham fine lady. make a good servant. I believe this to be possible; while, as any one will own, it is impossible for the best servant in all the world to make a good mistress. The reformatory process, if needed, must commence with me. Let me never lose sight of the fact, that my servants are women like myself-women with thoughts, feelings, habits, bad and good; with weaknesses, mental and physical; with aims and bopes distinctly defined, however limited; with a life here meant to be their school for the next life; with an immortal soul. As duty is the great end and blessing of existence, one of my first duties to my maiden is to see that she performs hers-to exact from her, kindly but firmly, the strict performance of that amount of service for which she was hired. Nothing more. I have not the slightest right to more. I did not buy her, soul and body; I merely en tered into a compact that, for just wages, she should do something she wished and was fitted to do anything over and above which she does for me, is an act of supererogation on her part, which I am bound to receive with pleasure, as springing out of those kindly relations which place the whole human race on one level of love. I have no objection to a pretty servant; on the contrary, it is rather a pleasure to see her about the house. But if she, whose total income is from eight to twelve pounds per annum, tries to make an appearance equal to myself, who justifiably spend thirty guineas a year on clothes alone, I will certainly show her, without any anger-poor thing, she does not harm me !-the extreme folly of such a proceeding. I would try to make her understand that, in her station as well as mine, true respectability lies in the woman herself, to which her mode of dress can add nothing, and may take a great deal away. But in this matter, as in most others, the mistress's personal example is at once the gentlest and the most infallible reproof. Depend upon it, my dear Mesdames Smith, Brown, and Jones, that if you make a point of appearing at your breakfast-table invariably at eight A. M.-I will not insult you by supposing any later hour possible in your well-regulated establishments-there will be little fear of your finding Martha drowsily opening the parlorshutters, or Sarah sulkily lighting the kitchenfire; if, in all your prandial arrangements, you fix a convenient time, and are punctual to it, satisfied that, except on emergencies, it is quite as unjust to Cook to keep her dinner waiting, as it is for Cook to keep the family waiting dinner you will not long have that indescribable nuisance, injurious both to health of body and quiet of mind-irregular, ill-cooked, uncomforta Lastly, if when things go wrong, as in the best of households must happen at times, you, the mistress, are seen to take it quietly, reproving and remedying as much as you please, but still always quietly; never for an instant allowing yourself to give way to that "temper" which you would remorselessly condemn in your inferiorswill you have still to complain of the "impertinence" of servants?-I think not. Then, as to her comforts. I know-as many of us sadly know!-the value of health myself I don't see why the same sanitary laws that apply to me should not apply to her. I do not think I have any right-if I have a right to keep a servant at all-to make her sleep in an un-ble meals. wholesome bedroom, be it hot, smothery kitchen, or damp back-kitchen, or close attic without either chimney or ventilator. I have no right to despatch her on needless errands in pelting wet nights or burning summer-days. Not the slight est right in the world to keep her" on her feet" nineteen hours out of the twenty-four-sending her to bed at one A. M., and feeling surprised if she does not rise the next morning at six. There is no condition of physical health which I claim "How strange!" said a lady, once, in my for myself that I ought not to grant to her, sub-hearing, to another, who was violently inveighing ject always to our different habits of life and against the insolence of her domestics: "I never constitutional requirements. Morally speaking, had a saucy speech from a servant in all my I most certainly am responsible, so far as my in- life." fluence and authority extend, not only for her soul's, but her body's welfare. But if these ap-not A fact which, much as she wondered at, I did - knowing her. The secret was simple enough she was a woman who had rule over knows that it best respects itself, in respecting herself, and therefore was capable of ruling other its superiors. There is no humility like that of people. Out of her own conscientiousness she wisdom, and no presumption like that of ignojustly judged her inferiors, and her own weak-rance. I would wish to see every human being ness taught her lenity towards theirs. With whom it has pleased Heaven to place in the all her individuality of ladyhood, her sympathies ranks of servitude raised, by moral example, were wide enough to give her some meeting by judicious and liberal education, and especially point of interest with the meanest Cinderella by invariable justice of treatment, to that safe that ever scudded slipshod across a floor; and height of self-knowledge and self-respect which, her large charity could, even in the darkest pic-alone, is true "respectability." ture of humanity, trace a little brightness litle hope. Above all, she had the rarely feminine quality of being able-let the vexed question be ever so confused, and her own feelings ever so mixed up therewith-always to see clearly the other side. -a "Honor and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part-there all the honor lies." Finally, I would fain refer to a higher Authority still; one, read unconsciously by my clerical It is this other side-the Kitchen-side-which nephew-in-law, on the very Saturday-evening I would have viewed more clearly, and more when the gigot went down stairs; heard, unconoften in parlors; viewed as a question of simple sciously, by my pretty niece in her fireside armjustice, in which the one wide law of a common chair, as well as by cook, housemaid, and nurhumanity, with its common rights, merits, and sery-maid, sitting apart by the dining-room door, errors, is perpetually recognized. Not by preach-in a white-aproned, respectful row; ing up an unnatural, unwholesome, and impossi-thority which, among many others, society acble equality; not, in any case, by lowering the knowledges with its lips, but would recoil in position of the mistress, but by raising that of astonishment if expected to believe in, or still the servant. Small fear that, so raised, she will worse-to act upon. Did you ever, my dear grow "above her place” — above the condition church-going friend, think of the plain, literal where her lot is cast, and for which she is best meaning of these plain words: "For one is qualified. I have always noticed that the higher your master, even Christ: and all ye are a man or woman rises in the scale of intelligence, brethren?" the more both gain of that honest pride which - an Au From the American Agriculturist. BY PARK BENJAMIN. Talk not to me of southern bowers, This morning stood the verdant spears, With their fast fading dead. And where they fell and all around In idle mood I love to pass Or listlessly to lie, Inhaling the delicious scents, From rural scenes so fair, This taste of natural air! This air, so softened by the breath And leave behind such sweet regret Though heroes pass away- OBLIGE PRONOUNCED OBLEEGE.-I have little doubt that this was the fashionable pronunciation of the word some sixty years ago. I am acquainted with one or two octogenarians, persons who pride themselves on their education; they always say obleege and oblecged. In a spellingbook of the date of 1748, I find that the young Crushed from those downcast, verdurous tents, ladies of that generation were directed to pro Beneath a sunset sky. It is a pure delight, which they Who dwell in cities, far away nounce farthing farden, such being the fashionable mode of pronunciation. Times are changed; we only find farden now among the very lowest classes.-Notes and Queries. LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 594.-13 OCTOBER 1855. From the Dublin University Magazine. THE MYSTERY OF THE BEASTS. Go! from the creatures thy instruction take; Learn from the beasts the physic of the field. weave; According to the doctrine of the metempsychosis-introduced into Greece by PythagoIn that tract of time which lies between the ras and Timæus-the brute animals are huages of fable and the epoch when the blended man beings in altered form. In their new civilization of Rome and Greece assumed its shape, they preserve a recollection of their former condition. They were believed by most gorgeous aspect, in all antiquity, the sciences which rest on the observation of positive sensitive, rational, and vegetative soul-corsome philosophers to possess three souls-the facts made no progress. We cannot say they responding to what, in recent times, has been did not exist. One man opened the inquiry, termed intellectual, organic, and animal life. but in this line of philosophy that solitary in- A book was written by Plutarch, to prove that dividual had no disciples. Aristotle, the phi- animals possess reason, inasmuch as the operlosopher we allude to, perused with attention the habits of brutes, and recorded them with liable to error than the mysterious operations ations of our boasted understanding are more care, and classed them in accordance with the of instinct. Poets, and even philosophers, relaws of a rude comparative physiology. But he had no followers in this path. The sci-garded them as our earliest teachers of the useful arts. At an early period (according to ences of which he laid the basis, and of which he foresaw the results, were stifled by the Pope)swarming luxuriance of fable. In lieu of observations, the most incredible and preposterous romances were massed together in the pages, for instance, of Elian, Ctesias, and even Pliny himself, philosophers who seem to have swallowed the grossest figments without a twinge of fastidiousness. It is perfectly amazing, and we can only account for it by supposing in those ages writing was so rare and costly an accomplishment, that individuals who could use the pen deemed it unbecoming to use their eyes. If the theologians of pagan antiquity were poets, as Bacon observes, their naturalists were even worse. Animals that crowded about their steps, and which they could not move their eyes without seeing, are the heroes of the most extravagant legends. The whole world is metamorphosed by superstition. Truth is ignominiously swept out, and dreams substituted for reality. Writers stride forward from prodigy to prodigy, with the arrogance and self esteem of authors who scorn to be observers. In the presence of brute instinct, man-the king of the creation -abdicates his reason, in order to endow the meanest animals with this prerogative. Nothing is more strange. When every being in existence is metamorphosed, he next proceeds industriously to invent a world of impossible beings, and his childish credulity greedily believes in all that his own teeming fancy invents. Finally, Polytheism attributes prescience to brutes-the power of ascertaining and indicating futurity; and, by way of climax to this pile of absurdities, sublimates them into deities. It is, we think, worthy of inquiry, why the inferior animals should be thus humanized at once by superstition, and poetry, and philosophy. DXCIV. LIVING AGE. VOL. XL 5 Learn of the little nautilus to sail, A grasshopper, instructed by the melodious teachings of the nightingale, carried off the prize in the Pythian games. The chargers of the Sybarites were famous for pleasing manners and accomplishments. They particularly surpassed in dancing; and on one occasion, when the battle-trumpet sounded a charge, and all the Sybarite cavalry were advancing at the signal, the Crotonian enemy suddenly struck up a reel, or jig, or dancing tune, whereupon the Sybarite chargers, mistaking a battle for a ball, began to foot it featly to the measure, and capered, and pranced, and tramped, so as to disorder the ranks, and, through love of pleasure, forfeited victory. Narratives and statements such as these frequently occur in the writings of the ancients, who tell them with the grave air of satisfied and undoubting credulity. Indeed they saw no reason to doubt them, when their philosophers, whose names were symbolical of wisdom, recognized men in brutes, in birds, and even in insects; and when beasts were assimi- For example: the brute has three souls; he lated in intellect to men, we cannot be sur- has consequently the same faculties as man, prised if animals employed human language; and the faculties being the same, the passions that is, when reason dwelt in the mind, we must be identical. Though modern science can readily suppose it spoken by the tongue. yields its unwilling assent to the undoubted The narratives of the fabulists are only dra- and melancholy fact, that the material appematic versions of universally accredited tradi- tites and instincts of man are only too identitions. That Æsop's fox should converse with cal with those of the brute, yet it refuses to the stork, or that a philosophic discussion admit of this analogy in the moral sentiments. should beguile the leisure of the town rat, A profound and even infinite difference is when visited by an acquaintance from the clearly recognized, though to define what this country, is not to be wondered at, when histo- difference consists in is a task of which modern ry itself teems with similar examples. On the science is incapable. It knows and proclaims, fall of Tarquin, a dog, in the open streets, however, that the sacred ray which enlightens could not contain his political sentiments, but and warms man has not reached the lower anigave expression to his republican opinions by mals. Now, antiquity was blind to this disfoudly vociferating his congratulations. When tinction. To the lower animals it attributed Domitian was assassinated, an observant crow, not merely the passions which agitate, but the perched on the capitol, favored the city with moral sentiments which dignify, and the affecits regicidal views by applauding the murder- tions which console, mankind. Rivals are ers. "It's a good deed," screamed the crow; found among the beasts and birds for the be"it is right well done." When Otho oppress-roes of tragic passion, such as Phædra, Oresed Rome, and Vitellius threatened the walls, tes, Pylades, etc. A goose, according to Pliny, the golden reins, to the terror of the alarmed city, dropped from the hands of the statue of Victory, and the oxen, in a low tone, were overheard exchanging private opinions on public affairs. When Lepidus and Catullus were consuls, a cock, in the farm-yard of Galerius, conversed like a human being; and Pliny, animadverting on this fact, gravely remarks, that "speaking cocks are very rare in history." One of the most extraordinary features in this superstition is, that while beasts are adepts in the language of men, it is only in exceedingly rare cases that men ever attain to any knowledge of the language of beasts. All antiquity produced but five individuals who reached this extraordinary height of science, namely Tiresias, Helenus, Cassandra, Apollonius of Tyana, and Melampus. Apollonius was suddenly gifted with this privilege in India, while manducating the heart of a dragon; and serpents communicated the faculty to Melampus. Here is the story:-The servants of Melampus found a nest of serpents in a hollow oak, which, after killing the old ones, they brought to Melampus, who ordered the young creatures to be carefully brought up. When these serpents reached maturity, their gratitude for the care bestowed on their education caused them one day, while Melampus was wrapped in profound repose, to glide close to his ears and lick them repeatedly, a process which improved his hearing to such exquisite fineness, that he was astonished, on awaking, to hear the brutes utter sounds that were quite intelligible to him. While it must be confessed that the zoology of antiquity is as fantastic and fabulous as an Arabian tale, it must be also admitted that, as far as we have yet gone, it is perfectly logical. fell desperately in love with a youth named Egius; and in Egypt a tender passion was conceived for the beautiful Glauce, a female musician of distinguished merit in the Court of Ptolemy by an amorous ram. A sublime constancy in friendship has been manifested from time to time by horses, eagles, and dolphins. A young girl in Sestos reared and fed an eagle, which, upon her death, was inconsolable; it rushed into her funeral pyre, and perished For these he changed the smoke of turf, But fretted in our climate cold, He lived and chattered many a-day, At last, when blind, and seeming dumb, He hailed the bird in Spanish speech- upon her ashes. A dolphin died of grief for onocentaurs, and the hippocentaurs, the huthe loss of a child, during the reign of Au- man shape is blended with that of the horse, gustus. This child was accustomed, on its the goat, the monkey, and the fish. Eschylus way to school, to cross the Lucrine lake every speaks of the daughters of Phoreys, who had day, which the dolphin observing, approached one common eye among five sisters, an eye the child and bore it on its back, safely de- which passed from hand to hand, apparently positing its burden on the opposite shore. One like a modern opera-glass. Snakes seen curlday the child failed to appear, and the dolphin ing on the heads of the Gorgons, in lieu of was seen waiting with evident uneasiness. The ordinary locks. dolphin came the next day and the next, but the child was dead, and the sympathetic fish, as if it were "A crime in heaven to love too well," sickened and perished of grief. These hybrid beings are dispersed in considerable numbers over the whole earth; but there are creatures combining the limbs of men with the forms of beasts, which fail to reproduce their kind, or at best give birth to monsters of a different nature. One of these, termed the chimæra, the daughter of Echidna, presented "A cherub's head, a serpent all the rest." All these monsters, according to a tradition which reminds us of the theories of geology, and which was known in the middle ages, were engendered in chaos, anteriorly to the formation of the earth. It was not merely poetry and popular credulity-science itself attested their existence. Pliny saw a centaur, Such tales justify us in maintaining that an- embalmed in honey, exhibited in Rome in the tiquity assimilated beasts to men. The mar reign of Claudius. The earliest Christian vellous predominates in these facts:- Onwriters, Justin, Cyprian, and Jerome, admit every hand real creatures are strangely trans- their existence, believing them to be fallen figured; but the unbridled fancy of antiquity angels, condemned to stroll through dismal solis not satisfied with transfiguration. When it itudes and uninhabited forests, until the day of has described grasshoppers that excelled in judgment. music, serpents that were profound linguists, eagles that committed suicide, and oxen that discussed politics, it turns from them in disgust to delight its greedy credulity with monsters made up of the discordant fragments of living types. Antiquity passionately loved a monster, and slighted or neglected existing animals, to conjure up with eager avidity animals that could never exist. The woods, mountains, seas, and even the infernal regions teem with horrible and dreadful forms-such as dragons with enormous pinions, winged This interesting creature was united to the horses, crocottes, that cunningly lured wood-fierce and terrific Typhon, to whom she bore men from their toils by calling them by name, four very anomalous children, renowned for and enticing them into the solitudes of the an extravagant superfluity of members-such forests, where they devoured them; griffins, as the hydra of Lerna with a hundred with sharp snouts; four-legged birds, furnish- heads; the cerberus with fifty heads; and ed with lion's claws, and covered with red another chimæra which had the undesirable feathers; the catoblepas, which shot from its peculiarity of possessing four feet and three terrible eyes glances that killed the most heads; as well as the dog of Geryon, slain by powerful warriors. The marticorus, according Hercules, etc. The heroes of antiquity, Theto the description of Ctesias, was a strange seus, Bellerophon, and Hercules, amused their jumble of incongruous parts. It had green leisure meritoriously, in braining this unneeyes, a scarlet skin, a lion's body, three rows cessary plurality of heads, just as the solitary of teeth, and the tail of a scorpion, in which, dragons that watched by the fountains or like a hand, it brandished a javelin. Accord- haunted the forests of the Celts were destroying to Pliny, fishes with horses' heads were of-ed by the heroes of a later period. As paganten seen in the Arabian Sea, out of which ism and the devil were personified by the they crawled at night to graze in the fields. dragons of the Christian legends, we may take The backs of whales were often seen rising above the surface of the Indian Ocean, to the extent of four acres; while in the waves of the Ganges enormous eels, thirty cubits long, slowly rolled their vast volumes. The fleet Amid this crowd of grotesque monstrosities, of Alexander was met by a shoal of monstrous the phoenix appears as the type of beauty, tunnies, which opposed it with the discipline gentleness, and grandeur. The existence of and numbers of an army. The Prætorian the phoenix is not simply asserted by the naguards fight with sea-serpents, and crimson turalists, the very gravest historians attest its the ocean with their blood to the extent of existence. The appearance of a phoenix in thirty thousand paces. In the centaurs, the the consulship of Paulus Fabius, and Vitellius, it for granted that the destructive carnivora of archaic ages (which retarded the progress or arrested the foundation of civilization) were represented by the monsters described above. |