Part 5
Much has been said of a mysterious treasure belonging to the crown, yearly augmented by a procession of millions of roubles to the vaults of the fortress of Saint Petersburg. Mr. Donai does not believe in this problematical deposit of wealth; because its sources, being such as have been here detailed including borrowed money, cannot accumulate. Borrowers are not usually people whose coffers overflow with millions. The real truth is that the Russian government gets money as savages get fruit, by cutting down the tree; and lives upon capital as well as interest. The loan of last year may have covered the interest of former loans, and perhaps the cost of arms purchased in Belgium; but even that is not certain, for six issues of paper money have already been forced into currency; private contributions have been claimed and urged upon the people from the pulpit with no very great result; and this reminds us that one source of money to the Czar has not been named in the preceding summary. It is the Russian church. There remains the bag of money in the pocket of the church. When, in eighteen hundred and forty-five, the empress was to go to Italy, the clergy paid a contribution of two millions--the price of the forcible conversion of the peasants in the Baltic provinces. The present war is set forth as a holy war, and the church may be asked fairly to assist in paying for it, and no doubt is asked very perseveringly, and for no small sums. But how heavy is the purse of the Russian church? Its contents used to be valued at twenty-six millions sterling; and, although the holy fathers may contribute even to the last farthing, we unfortunately know that twenty-six millions are soon swallowed up when a great war is being waged.
Thus the case is said to stand as regards money. It is not any better in respect of men. In time of war the Russians do not abhor military service as they do in time of peace; because they are then better treated, and have prospects of advancement. But it appears that the Russians do not make a soldier fit to be led against the enemy until after several years’ drilling. Deduct from the Czar’s million of men four hundred thousand that can form lines only on paper, and three hundred thousand destroyed in the present struggle, only three hundred thousand old soldiers remain to cover the whole frontier, north, south, east, and west. Another campaign will destroy them nearly all, and there will remain nothing but an army of recruits. Fanaticism may be infused into these by abolishing serfdom, and by other home appeals; but their fighting powers will be very low indeed at the end of another campaign. To urge on the war, therefore, without giving time for a recovery of breath, is to destroy the attacking power of the Russian empire; and all the arts and all the diplomacy at its command--and they are both numerous and skilful--ever have been and ever will be to gain time. Time is, with Russia, nearly synonymous with victory.
Its defensive power nobody is disposed to under-estimate. In this matter, its real weakness gives it, in one sense, special strength. Steppes, swamps, and vast regions almost destitute of roads, a bad climate, a thin population barely civilised that vanishes before approaching hosts and leaves only a desert for the enemy to traverse, are obstacles that exist now as they existed in the days of Pultawa and Moscow. Upon this the Czar reposes his last trust. But every condition of the empire is such as to cause its vital parts to be rather upon its western and southern borders than in its more central parts. Drive the people into the inhospitable interior, and their difficulties of subsistence will be only a little less insurmountable than those of an enemy. Indeed, of the prodigious superficies over which the empire extends--including, as it does, nearly one-seventh part of the terrestrial globe--by far the greatest proportion is uninhabitable to friend or foe. The enormous northern provinces, especially, are destined to perpetual sterility, not only on account of the extreme rigour of the climate, but because nearly all the great rivers by which they are traversed fall into the Arctic Ocean; and are therefore inaccessible for the whole or a greater part of the year. We may live to see, therefore, that the Muscovite tradition of defence is quite as vain a trust as most of the traditions blindly followed in these days, unless the peace now in course of negotiation be lasting and secure.
The interruption--nay, the paralysis--of commerce occasioned by the present war is another source of exhaustion. Except for ordinary necessaries of life, Russia draws her supplies from foreign countries in exchange for raw material produced from the estates of the nobles. She has such endless supplies of timber that to give an idea of some of her forests, it is said, as a specimen, that a squirrel might hop from Saint Petersburg to Moscow from tree to tree without touching the ground, and that she could, under a rational system, afford illimitable tallow, hemp, and oil; but these sources of wealth are impeded and crippled very naturally when nearly every port she possesses along her limited sea-board is blockaded.
A SMALL MONKISH RELIC.
No more than a few months have elapsed since the greatest Greek scholar of the day, the Reverend Doctor Gaisford, late Dean of Christchurch, Oxford, was carried to his last resting-place within the walls of the ancient cathedral over which he had presided so many years. The students of the house, clad in white surplices, preceded the remains of their venerated Dean as the procession passed along the east side of the quadrangle, from the deanery to the cathedral. Great Tom had, by tolling every minute (a thing never done except at the death of the sovereign or the dean), announced the decease; and now a small land-bell, carried in front of the procession by the dean’s verger, and tolled every half-minute, announced that the last rites were about to take place.
The cathedral clock struck four; the usual merry peal of bells for evening prayers was silent. We strolled towards the cathedral, and finding a side-door open, walked in. The dull, harsh, and grating sound of the workmen filling up the grave struck heavily on our ears, as it resounded through the body of the church. The mourners were all gone; and alone, at the head of the grave, watching vacantly the busy labourers, stood the white-headed old verger; another hour, the ground would be all levelled, and the stones replaced over the master he had served faithfully so many years.
The verger informed us that the ground now opened had not been moved for two hundred years, and that a dean had not been buried within the precincts of the church for nearly one hundred years. Bearing these facts in mind, we poked about among the earth which had been thrown out of the grave. We found among the brick-bats and rubbish a few broken portions of human bones, which had evidently been buried very many years; but fastened on to one of the brick-bats we discovered a little bone which we at once pronounced not to be human. It was a little round bone, about the size of a large shirt-stud, from the centre of which projected a longish, tooth-like spine, the end of which still remained as sharp as a needle, and the enamel which covered it still resisted a scratch from a knife. The actual body of the bone was very light and brittle, and a simple test we applied showed that it had been under ground very many years.
The question arose, what was our bone, and how did it get to the place where it was found? It was shown to the greatest authority we have in comparative anatomy, and he immediately pronounced it to be a spine from the back of a very large fish, commonly known as the skate or thornback. This creature has, fixed into the skin of his back in a row along the back of his tail, many very sharp prickles of a tooth-like character, and covered with enamel, just like our specimen. If one of these skin-teeth be cut out from a recent fish, the stud-like knob of bone into which the spine is fixed, will be found, serving to keep this formidable weapon (for such it is) in its proper position; and dreadful blows can Mr. Thornback give with his armed tail in his battles, be they submarine, or be they in the fisherman’s boat.
How did the spine of a thornback get into Christchurch Cathedral, into ground that had not been moved for two hundred years? Before the days of Henry the Eighth the precincts, where the college now stands, were occupied by monkish buildings, where monks had many fast-days, and, on these days, were probably great consumers of fish. The supply of fresh-water fish, from the Thames close by, would hardly be equal to the demand. It is therefore probable that they procured salt-water fish, and a thornback is, above all fish, the most likely to have been supplied by the fishmonger.
In an old book on fishes and serpents, we found, unexpectedly, evidence to prove that the skate--a hundred years ago--formed a favourite dish at the high tables of the colleges. The book was published in seventeen hundred and sixty-three, and the passage runs thus: “The skate, or flaire, is remarkably large, and will sometimes weigh above one hundred pounds; but what is still more extraordinary, there was one sold by a fishmonger at Cambridge to St. John’s College, which weighed two hundred pounds, and dined one hundred and twenty people. The length was forty-two inches, and the breadth thirty-one inches.”
The monkish cook--like a cook of the present day--would, probably, skin and cut off the tail of the thornback, when he cooked him for the monks’ dinner, and then he would probably throw both skin and tail, spines and all, into the rubbish-hole outside the kitchen; there they would remain till removed. And, next, when did this removal take place? A curious book--Collectanea Curiosa--published at Oxford in seventeen hundred and eighty-one, tells us. In this book there is an article entitled, “Out of the journal book of the expences of all the buildings of Christ Church College, Oxon, which I had of Mr. Pore, of Blechinton.”
The second item runs thus: “Spent about the femerell of the new kitchen and sundry gutters pertaining to the same, xviijs. viijd.”
Further on we find, “Paid to Thomas Hewister, for carriage of earth and rubble from the fayre gate, and the new stepull to fill the ditches, on the backside of the college, clvj. loads, at a peny the load by computation, xiijs.”
Again: “Paid to Mr. David Griffith, Priest, for his stipend for wages, as well for keeping of the monastery of St. Frideswide, and saying of Divine service after the suppression of the same unto the first stalling of the dean and canons in the said college, as for his labours in overseeing the workmen dayly labouring there in all by the space of thirteen months, vij £.”
From this evidence it will appear that for a considerable space of time (probably about five years) many alterations were made, and much earth removed from place to place. The cathedral, and, in fact, nearly all the quadrangle--as will appear by comparing their levels with that of the street outside--stand upon made ground. It is probable, therefore, that some of the earth from outside the monkish kitchen, or other rubbish hole, was carted to form the floor of the cathedral, and with it, of course, any rubbish that happened to be there.
This, then, was the fate of our thornback’s spine. The thornback was eaten by the monks of St. Frideswide, the spine thrown away, unheeded, unregarded, to be disinterred, after the lapse of more than three hundred years, at the funeral of a college dean, and finally to be honoured by having its history recorded in Household Words.
LITTLE SAINT ZITA.
There is a collection of horrible, though admirably executed etchings, by the “noble Jacques Callott,” extant, called Les Saincts et Sainctes de l’Année. It is a complete pictorial calendar of the Romish martyrology. No amount of indigestion, caused by suppers of underdone pork-chops; no nightmares, piled one on another; no distempered imaginings of topers in the worst state of delirium tremens; no visions of men with guilt-laden consciences; could culminate into a tenth part of the horrors that the noble Jacques has perpetuated with his immortal graver. All the refinements of torture, invented by the ruthless and cruel pagans, and inflicted by them on the early confessors, are here set down in chiaro oscuro; not a dislocated limb is omitted, not a lacerated muscle is passed over. The whole work is a vast dissecting-room--a fasciculus of scarifications, maimings, and dismemberments--of red-hot pincers, scalding oil, molten lead, gridirons, wire scourges, jagged knives, crowns of spikes, hatchets, poisoned daggers, tarred shirts, and wild beasts.
The blessed saints had a bad time of it for certain. How should we, I wonder, with our pluralities, our Easter-offerings, and regium donum, our scarlet hats and stockings, and dwellings in the gate of Flam; our Exeter Hall meetings and buttered muffins afterwards; our first-class missionary passages to the South Seas, and grants of land and fat hogs from King Wabashongo; our dean and chapter dinners, and semi-military chaplains’ uniforms (Oh, last-invented, but not least scorn-worthy of humbugs!); how should we confront the stake, the shambles, and the carnifex, the scourge, the rack, and the amphitheatre? Surely the faith must have been strong, or the legends untrue!
Yet there are more saints than the noble Jacques ever dreamed of in his grim category, crowded as it is. Saint Patrick, if we may credit the Irish legend, had two birthdays; still, the number of saints, all duly canonised, is so great, that the year can scarcely spare them the sixth of a birth-day apiece. Only yesterday, the postman (he is a Parisian postman, and, in appearance, is something between a policeman and a field-marshal in disguise) brought me a deformed little card, on which was pasted an almanac with a whole calendar-full of saints, neatly tied up with cherry-coloured ribbon, accompanying the gift with the compliments of the season, and an ardent wish that the new year might prove bonne et belle to me; all of which meant that I should give him two francs, on pain of being denounced to the concierge as a curmudgeon, to the landlord as a penniless lodger, and to the police as a suspicious character. Musing over the little almanac, in the futile attempt to get two francs’ worth of information out of it, I found a whole army of saints, of whom I had never heard before, and noticed the absence of a great many who are duly set down in another calendar I possess. Would you believe that neither Saint Giles nor Saint Swithin was to be found in my postman’s hagiology--that no mention was made of Saint Waldeburga, or of the blessed Saint Wuthelstan; while on the other hand I found Saint Yon, Saint Fiacre, Saint Ovid, Saint Babylas, Saint Pepin, Saint Ponce, Saint Frisque, Saint Nestor, and Saint Pantaloon? What do we know of these saints in England? Where were Saint Willibald, Saint Winifred, Saint Edward the Confessor, and Saint Dunstan, the nose-tweaker? Nowhere! Yet they must all have their days, their eves, and feasts. Where, above all, was my little Saint Zita?
If one of the best of Christian gentlemen--the kindly humourist, who wrote the Ingoldsby Legends--could tell us, without scandal to his cloth or creed, the wondrous stories of Saint Gengulphus and Saint Odille, Saint Anthony and Saint Nicholas, shall I be accused of irreverence, if, in my own way, I tell the legend of little Saint Zita? I must premise that the first discovery of the saintly tradition is due to M. Alphonse Karr, who has a villa at Genoa, the birth-place of the saint herself.
I have no memory for dates, and have no printed information to go upon, so I am unable to state the exact year, or even century, in which Saint Zita flourished. But I know that it was in the dark ages, and that the Christian religion was young, and that it was considerably more than one thousand five hundred years ago.
Now, Pomponius Cotta (I give him that name because it is a sounding one--not that I know his real denomination) was a noble Roman. He was one of the actors in that drama which Mr. Gibbon of London and Lausanne so elegantly described some centuries afterwards: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It must have been a strange time, that Decline and Fall. Reflecting upon the gigantic, overgrown, diseased civilisation of the wonderful empire, surrounded and preyed upon by savage and barbarous Goths and Visigoths, Vandals, Dacians, and Pannonians, I cannot help picturing to myself some superannuated old noble, accomplished, luxurious, diseased and depraved--learned in bon-mots and scandalous histories of a former age, uselessly wealthy, corruptly cultivated, obsoletely magnificent, full of memories of a splendid but infamous life, too old to reform, too callous to repent, cynically presaging a deluge after him, yet trembling lest that deluge should come while he was yet upon the stage, and wash his death-bed with bitter waters; who is the sport and mock, the unwilling companion and victim unable to help himself, of a throng of rough, brutal, unpolished youngsters--hobbedehoys of the new generation--who carouse at his expense, smoke tobacco under his nose, borrow his money, slap him on the back, and call him old fogey behind it, sneer at his worn-out stories, tread on his gouty toes, ridicule his obsolete politeness, and tie crackers to the back of his coat collar. Have you not seen the decline and fall of the human empire? So men and empires have alike their decadence.
But Pomponius Cotta never recked, it is very probable, of such things. He might have occasionally expressed his belief, like some noble Romans of our own age and empire, that the country was going to the bad; but he had large revenues, which he spent in a right noble and Roman manner; and he laid whatever ugly misgivings he had in a red sea of Falernian and Chiajian (if, indeed, all the stock of those celebrated brands had not already been drunk out by the thirsty Visigoths and Vandals). He had the finest house in Genoa; and you who know what glorious palaces the city of the Dorias and the Spinolas can yet boast of, even in these degenerate days, may form an idea of what marvels of marble, statuary, frescos, and mosaics owned Pomponius Cotta for lord, in the days when there was yet a Parthenon at Athens and a Capitol at Rome.
The noble Pomponius was a Christian, but I am afraid in a very slovenly, lukewarm, semi-pagan sort of way. As there are yet in France some shrivelled old good-for-nothings whose sympathies are with Voltaire and d’Alembert--who sigh for the days of the Encyclopedia, the Esprits-forts, and the Baron d’Holbach’s witty, wicked suppers, so Pomponius furtively regretted the old bad era before creation heard the voice that cried out that the good Pan was dead[5]--the days when there were mysteries and oracles, sacrifices and haruspices, Lares and Penates, and when laziness and lust, dishonesty and superstition, were reduced into systems, and dignified with the name of philosophy. So Pomponius half believed in the five thousand gods he had lost, and was but a skin-deep worshipper of the One left. As for his wife, the Domina Flavia Pomponia, she came of far too noble a Roman family, was far too great a lady, thought far too much of crimping her tresses, perfuming her dress, painting her face, giving grand entertainments, and worrying her slaves, to give herself to piety and the practice of religion; and though Onesimus, that blessed though somewhat unclean hermit, did often come to the Pomponian house and take its mistress roundly to task for her mundane mode of life, she only laughed at the good man; quizzed his hair, shirt, and long thickly-peopled beard; and endeavoured to seduce him from his hermit fare of roots and herbs and spring-water, by pressing invitations to partake of dainty meals and draughts of hot wine.
[Footnote 5: This is one of the earliest traditions of the Christian era. That at midnight on the first Christmas-Eve a great voice was heard all over the world, crying “The God Pan is dead.” Milton bursts into colossal melody on this key-note in his magnificent Christmas hymn.]
I am not so uncharitable as to assume that all the seven deadly sins found refuge in the mansion of Pomponius Cotta, but it is certain that it was a very fortalice and citadel for one of them--namely, gluttony. There never were such noble Romans (out of Guildhall) as the Pomponii for guzzling and guttling, banqueting, junketing, feasting, and carousing. It was well that plate glass was not invented in those times, for the house was turned out of windows regularly every day, and the major part of the Pomponian revenues would have been expended in glaziers’ bills. But there were dinners and suppers and after-suppers. The guests ate till they couldn’t move, and drank till they couldn’t see. Of course they crowned themselves with flowers, and lolled upon soft couches, and had little boys to titillate their noses with rare perfumes, and pledged each other to the sounds of dulcet music; but they were an emerited set of gormandisers for all that, and richly deserved the visitation of the stern Nemesis that sate ever in the gate in the shape of the fair-haired barbarian, with the brand to burn, the sword to slay, and the hands to pillage. Or, like the Philistine lords, they caroused and made merry, unwotting of that stern, moody, blind Samson, sitting apart, yonder, with his hair all a-growing, and soon to arise in his might and pull the house down on their gluttonous heads. Or, like Belshazzar’s feasters, they were drunk in vessels of gold and silver, while the fingers of a man’s hand were writing on the wall, and the Medes and Persians were at the gate.
It may easily be imagined that in such a belly-god temple--such a house of feasting and wassail--the cook was a personage of great power and importance. Pomponius Cotta had simply the best cook not only in Genoa, but in Magna Græcia--not only in Magna Græcia, but in the whole Italian peninsula. But no man-cook had he--no haughty, stately, magister coquinæ, no pedant in Apicius or bigoted believer in Lucullus. Yet Pomponius was proud and happy in the possession of a culinary treasure--a real cordon-bleu, a Mrs. Glasse of the dark ages, a Miss Acton of antiquity, a Mrs. Rumball of Romanity; and this was no other than a little slave girl whom they called Zita.