It was easy enough to detect plagiarisms in the "Paradise Lost" from Latin passages fathered upon imaginary writers, when these passages had previously been forged by Lauder himself for the purpose of sustaining such a charge.
4
It is a significant fact, that Dr. Strauss, whose sceptical spirit, left to its own disinterested motions, would have looked through and through this monstrous fable of Essenism, coolly adopted it, no questions asked, as soon as he perceived the value of it as an argument against Christianity.
5
"Solitary road."—The reader must remember that, until the seventh century of our era, when Mahometanism arose, there was no collateral history. Why there was none, why no Gothic, why no Parthian history, it is for Rome to explain. We tax ourselves, and are taxed by others, with many an imaginary neglect as regards India; but assuredly we cannot be taxed with that neglect. No part of our Indian empire, or of its adjacencies, but has occupied the researches of our Oriental scholars.
6
As occasions arise in these Sketches, when, merely for the purposes of intelligibility, it becomes requisite to call into notice such personal distinctions in my family as otherwise might be unimportant, I here record the entire list of my brothers and sisters, according to their order of succession; and Miltonically I include myself; having surely as much logical right to count myself in the series of my own brothers as Milton could have to pronounce Adam the goodliest of his own sons. First and last, we counted as eight children, viz., four brothers and four sisters, though never counting more than six living at once, viz., 1. William, older than myself by more than five years; 2. Elizabeth; 3. Jane, who died in her fourth year; 4. Mary; 5. myself, certainly not the goodliest man of men since born my brothers; 6. Richard, known to us all by the household name of Pink, who in his after years tilted up and down what might then be called his Britannic majesty's oceans (viz., the Atlantic and Pacific) in the quality of midshipman, until Waterloo in one day put an extinguisher on that whole generation of midshipmen, by extinguishing all further call for their services; 7. a second Jane; 8. Henry, a posthumous child, who belonged to Brazennose College, Oxford, and died about his twenty-sixth year.
7
Cicero, in a well-known passage of his "Ethics", speaks of trade as irredeemably base, if petty, but as not so absolutely felonious if wholesale.
8
It is true that in those days paregoric elixir was occasionally given to children in colds; and in this medicine there is a small proportion of laudanum. But no medicine was ever administered to any member of our nursery except under medical sanction; and this, assuredly, would not have been obtained to the exhibition of laudanum in a case such as mine. For I was then not more that twenty-one months old: at which age the action of opium is capricious, and therefore perilous.
9
"Aureola."—The aureola is the name given in the "Legends of the Christian Saints" to that golden diadem or circlet of supernatural light (that glory, as it is commonly called in English) which, amongst the great masters of painting in Italy, surrounded the heads of Christ and of distinguished saints.
10
"The astonishment of science."—Her medical attendants were Dr. Percival, a well-known literary physician, who had been a correspondent of Condorcet, D'Alembert, &c., and Mr. Charles White, the most distinguished surgeon at that time in the north of England. It was he who pronounced her head to be the finest in its development of any that he had ever seen—an assertion which, to my own knowledge, he repeated in after years, and with enthusiasm. That he had some acquaintance with the subject may be presumed from this, that, at so early a stage of such inquiries, he had published a work on human craniology, supported by measurement of heads selected from all varieties of the human species. Meantime, as it would grieve me that any trait of what might seem vanity should creep into this record, I will admit that my sister died of hydrocephalus; and it has been often supposed that the premature expansion of the intellect in cases of that class is altogether morbid— forced on, in fact, by the mere stimulation of the disease. I would, however, suggest, as a possibility, the very opposite order of relation between the disease and the intellectual manifestations. Not the disease may always have caused the preternatural growth of the intellect; but, inversely, this growth of the intellect coming on spontaneously, and outrunning the capacities of the physical structure, may have caused the disease.
11
"I stood in unimaginable trance And agony which cannot be remembered."Speech of Alhadra, in Coleridge's Remorse
12
"The guard."—I know not whether the word is a local one in this sense. What I mean is a sort of fender, four or five feet high, which locks up the fire from too near an approach on the part of children.
13
"Memnonian."—For the sake of many readers, whose hearts may go along earnestly with a record of infant sorrow, but whose course of life has not allowed them much leisure for study, I pause to explain—that the head of Memnon, in the British Museum, that sublime head which wears upon its lips a smile coextensive with all time and all space, an Aeonian smile of gracious love and Pan-like mystery, the most diffusive and pathetically divine that the hand of man has created, is represented, on the authority of ancient traditions, to have uttered at sunrise, or soon after as the sun's rays had accumulated heat enough to rarefy the air within certain cavities in the bust, a solemn and dirge-like series of intonations; the simple explanation being, in its general outline, this— that sonorous currents of air were produced by causing chambers of cold and heavy air to press upon other collections of air, warmed, and therefore rarefied, and therefore yielding readily to the pressure of heavier air. Currents being thus established by artificial arrangements of tubes, a certain succession of notes could be concerted and sustained. Near the Red Sea lies a chain of sand hills, which, by a natural system of grooves inosculating with each other, become vocal under changing circumstances in the position of the sun, &c. I knew a boy who, upon observing steadily, and reflecting upon a phenomenon that met him in his daily experience, viz., that tubes, through which a stream of water was passing, gave out a very different sound according to the varying slenderness or fulness of the current, devised an instrument that yielded a rude hydraulic gamut of sounds; and, indeed, upon this simple phenomenon is founded the use and power of the stethoscope. For exactly as a thin thread of water, trickling through a leaden tube, yields a stridulous and plaintive sound compared with the full volume of sound corresponding to the full volume of water, on parity of principles, nobody will doubt that the current of blood pouring through the tubes of the human frame will utter to the learned ear, when armed with the stethoscope, an elaborate gamut or compass of music recording the ravages of disease, or the glorious plenitudes of health, as faithfully as the cavities within this ancient Memnonian bust reported this mighty event of sunrise to the rejoicing world of light and life; or, again, under the sad passion of the dying day, uttered the sweet requiem that belonged to its departure.
14
"Everlasting Jew."—Der ewige Jude—which is the common German expression for "The Wandering Jew," and sublimer even than our own.
15
First Epistle to Corinthians, chap. xv., beginning at ver. 20.
16
This beautiful expression, I am pretty certain, must belong to Mrs. Trollope; I read it, probably, in a tale of hers connected with the backwoods of America, where the absence of such a farewell must unspeakably aggravate the gloom at any rate belonging to a household separation of that eternal character occurring amongst the shadows of those mighty forests.
17
"Galleries."—These, though condemned on some grounds by the restorers of authentic church architecture, have, nevertheless, this one advantage—that, when the height of a church is that dimension which most of all expresses its sacred character, galleries expound and interpret that height.
