Part 2
A most ingenious member of the Geological Society, in his observations upon this subject, conceived that this great strength was given to the hinder extremities of the animal, that it might the better stand upon three feet, and scratch with the fore foot that was free. We should have the more willingly assented to this idea had the hind foot been obviously calculated for standing upon; but the processes of the bones, and the formation of the toes, seem to indicate that this limb was to be more actively employed. Why not suppose that it dug like such animals as we see employed in digging?--they work with their fore feet, and, after a certain accumulation, make more desperate exertions with their hind feet, to clear away the encumbrance. On the whole, the extremities of this animal must have been short compared with his length, and the breadth of his haunches; for his height is not estimated at more than seven feet. As we have said, the processes of the bones imply great muscular strength, and, probably, activity,--such activity as we see in the motions of the armadillo.
Nothing is more surprising than the smallness of the head in this animal: indeed we could not have believed that the head belonged to these enormous bones, had not Mr. Cliff put the vertebræ together, and did we not see that those of the neck corresponded with each other; and that the anterior vertebra of all, the atlas, fitted exactly into the articulating processes of the skull. This part is imperfect, but happily the teeth and a portion of the jaw are here. The teeth are most singular in their structure. There are no incisors or front teeth. Probably the animal had a projecting snout, like the tapir in the Zoological Gardens. It certainly had not a trunk like the elephant; because the length of the neck, as shown by the vertebræ, enabled it to reach the ground with the mouth: and neither the form of the bones of the face, nor the holes through which the nerves pass, indicate the attachment of such an organ as the trunk. The teeth are seated in the back part of the jaw; their ground surfaces enter into one another with extraordinary exactness; and the enamel is so placed that they are worn in a manner quite peculiar. They are unlike the teeth of the lion or of the tiger; they obviously suffered great attrition: and are provided against a rapid wasting by the mode of their growth, which resembles that of the front teeth of animals which gnaw--the rodentia. The projecting incisor teeth of the beaver, for example, cut like an adze, but they necessarily suffer from the attrition; to provide against which they grow at their roots, and advance forwards in proportion as they waste on their exposed surfaces. These teeth of the megatherium, although in the usual place of grinders, have the provision for growing at the fangs, whilst they waste on their crowns; which implies that they were used in cutting vegetables, and, probably, the roots dug out of the earth. From the processes of the scapula, or shoulder-blade, we see that this animal had a clavicle, or collar-bone, and that the radius and ulna had free rotatory motion: the marks upon the humerus, too, show that the muscles which roll the wrist-joint were powerful: now these, with the adaptation in the form of the toes for long and strong claws, lead us to believe that the animal turned out the earth like the mole, and was in structure something between the sloth and the ant-eater. Altogether, it would appear that he dug and searched for roots, and lived on vegetables.
There is another fact important to our speculations on the habits of this animal; there has been brought home from the same districts, and found along with bones similar to these, though remotely placed from the present specimen, a cover like the shell of the armadillo, but of a size like a great brewer’s boiler, and studded with tubercles, like the nails upon a prison-door. If this shell covered the animal, for what purpose of defence could it be? An ingenious geologist conceived that the animal had the power of flinging up the soil in such masses, that, in descending, it required a protection to its back. This conjecture will hardly be satisfactory; and yet to suppose that such a creature, possessed of such dimensions, could have a formidable enemy, and that it required the protection of a defensive armour, like the armadillo, is perhaps equally extravagant.
According to the methods of the naturalists, from the circumstance of this animal wanting the front teeth, we should class it with the _Edentés_ of Cuvier, and, following that author, place it along with the megalonyx (having _large claws_). This latter animal, also extinct, President Jefferson described as a great lion, higher in limbs than our largest ox, and the enemy of the grand mastodon, thereby presenting a terrific idea of the ancient world. But Cuvier, by his knowledge of anatomy, proved it to have been a vegetable feeder, and to be properly classed with the tardigrade animals, a harmless race.
This specimen of the megatherium, in its magnificent ruins, must give activity to the fancy. It is said that there is nothing interesting in antiquarian research, but as it is associated with man,--with human action or suffering. But here are remains which carry the mind back to the most remote times; not into the contemplation of the ages of mankind, but to the earlier condition of the globe, when it was undergoing a succession of changes, which were, at length, to suit it for the abode of the human race.
The condition of a part of these bones may convey an idea of the plains where they are found. Some of them are nearly consumed by fire; the natives using them for setting their kettles on when cooking. To understand how they should be applied for such uses, we must recollect that there is no stone to resist the fire; and that there is nothing but mud and vegetable productions for many hundred miles around where these bones were discovered.
The wood-cut of the megatherium at the head of this notice is copied from a plate in the great work of Cuvier on Fossil Bones, which representation is from the specimen in Madrid.
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THE WEEK.
[Illustration: Dryden]
August 9th.--The anniversary of the birth of JOHN DRYDEN. This great poet was born in 1631, in the parish of Aldwinkle-All-Saints, Northamptonshire, where his father, the third son of Sir Erasmus Dryden, Bart., had a small estate. The poet’s third son, Erasmus Henry, eventually succeeded to this baronetcy. All Dryden’s near connexions appear to have attached themselves in the civil wars to the party of the Parliament; and the poet himself, afterwards so celebrated for his royalist strains, began also by exercising his talents on that side of the question. The first verses by which he made himself much known, were his ‘Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell,’ in which he celebrated the memory of the Protector and his actions with no cold or sparing panegyric. When the Restoration, however, a few months after, brought other principles or professions into fashion, Dryden, with many more, made no scruple to adopt the new creed. His Elegy on Cromwell was followed by his ‘Astræa Redux,’ an effusion of thanksgiving ‘on the happy Restoration and Return of his sacred Majesty Charles II.;’ and that by a shorter piece on the coronation of the same monarch. As the poet, however, was yet only in his twenty-ninth year, perhaps it may be thought that he had not passed the age for the only change of political opinion which is usually looked upon with indulgence--the first, namely, which a man makes, or that in which he relinquishes the creed of education and custom, for that of reason and experience. And it is at least to be said for Dryden, that after this he distinguished himself by no second apostacy, but, right or wrong, adhered steadily during the remainder of his days to the colours under which he now took his place, although he lived to see the time when it would certainly have been for his worldly interest to have again changed sides, and when he would also have had many and high examples to countenance him in so doing. It was in the year after the publication of his ‘Astræa Redux’ that he first appeared in the character of a dramatist, which he afterwards sustained by so long a series of productions. His commencing effort in this line was his play entitled ‘The Duke of Guise,’ It was in the ‘Annus Mirabilis,’ however, which appeared in 1667, that his genius first broke forth with any promise of that full effulgence at which it eventually arrived. It is with the publication of this poem too that he may be properly said to have entered upon authorship as a profession; and from that event till the close of the century, his life may be described as having been but one long literary labour, scarcely ever relieved by any considerable interval of repose. We cannot here go over in detail the names and dates of his manifold productions; but we may merely observe that no fewer than twenty-eight dramas, and eight original poems of considerable length, besides many minor effusions, and several volumes of poetical translation from Chaucer, Boccaccio, Ovid, Theocritus, Lucretius, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Virgil, together with no small number of treatises in prose, in the shape of dedications, prefaces, and other more elaborate disquisitions, attest the unwearied industry, as well as the singular fertility of his mind. Such incessant exertions were so far from exhausting his genius, that his powers continued not only to do their work with unimpaired elasticity, but even apparently to gather new vigour and dexterity to the last. His celebrated ‘Alexander’s Feast,’ and his admirable Fables, (the latter, translations indeed, in so far as the incidents are concerned, from Boccaccio and Chaucer, but made by Dryden entirely his own by the embellishment and the filling up,) were written when the illustrious author was on the verge of his seventieth year, and suffering under poverty and accumulated afflictions, from which he was relieved by death a few months afterwards. He died on the 1st of May, 1700, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, in a grave next to that of Chaucer. Among our English poets Dryden stands at the head of the school to which he belongs, which, however, is not that of the highly imaginative, but rather that of the intense, energetic, and pointed, in feeling and expression. Pope, who is to be classed as, in many respects, his pupil, has excelled him in precision, regularity, and neatness of diction, and his wit, also, if not more brilliant, is certainly more refined and unmixed; but he has not approached Dryden either in the rich and varied music of his verse, or in the cordiality of his indignant declamation, or in the exquisitely free and easy flow of his merely discursive passages. There is nothing, indeed, more perfect in the language than Dryden’s reasoning in rhyme. Here, and in every thing else, his extraordinary command of expression is one of the chief sources of his strength. Dryden’s vocabulary, without comprehending the whole extent of the English tongue, is yet complete for the demands of his particular range of composition. Certainly few writers have wielded language with a more perfect mastery of the weapon. And it is this which not only gives much of its power to his poetry, but has also imparted to his prose style a charm that has been rarely equalled. It deserves, however, to be remarked, that to his affluence of words are probably to be in part ascribed some of his defects as well as many of his excellences. As a dramatist he has almost completely failed, and perhaps to a greater degree than he otherwise would have done, simply because he was so consummate a rhetorician. In his plays, as in all his other productions, he has given us sonorous verse and splendid declamation in abundance, but little true passion--many feats of art, but few touches of nature--much, in short, to fill the ear, but almost nothing to move the heart. But on another account also, indeed, Dryden was altogether unfitted to excel as a dramatic writer. He wanted the power of forgetting and abstracting himself from his merely personal feelings. But nearly every thing that Dryden has written most forcibly--every thing he has done in which there is really any passion, derives the chief portion of its animation from its being the mere utterance of his own rage, or scorn, or exultation, or other pervading sentiment at the moment. There is none of that passing out of himself into another being, the capacity of which is the soul of dramatic genius, and by the exertion of which a great dramatist seems not to speak through his characters, but only, as it were, to listen to what they say, and faithfully to write it down.
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THE LIBRARY.
[Select Works of the British Poets, with Biographical and Critical Prefaces by Dr. Aikin. 8vo. Lond. 1824. Price 18s. in boards.]
This is a volume which we hold to be eminently deserving of a place in our library list. Its merits are, first, that it contains an extraordinary quantity of matter for the price, and is therefore a very cheap book; and secondly, that it contains almost nothing but what is excellent in quality, and is therefore a book whose possession is really a treasure. It is also beautifully printed.
To those who do not know the volume, its title may not convey a correct notion of what it is. It is not a collection of poetical _extracts_, but of entire poems. None of the pieces are in any way abridged or altered. Whatever is given is printed in an unmutilated and perfect form, as it came from the pen of the author, and is to be found in the fullest and most authentic edition of his works. The book becomes, in this way, in the literal sense of the expression, a poetical library,--that is to say, an assemblage not of scattered leaves, from the works of our poets, but of their principal works themselves. Here are the whole of the Paradise Lost, the Paradise Regained, the Comus, and the Samson Agonistes, of Milton; Dryden’s Palemon and Arcite, in three books; J. Philips’s Cyder, in two books; Addison’s Campaign, and his Letter from Italy; Prior’s Alma, and his Solomon; Gay’s Trivia, and his Shepherd’s Walk; Somerville’s Chase; Pope’s Rape of the Lock, his Essay on Man, and his Moral Essays; Thomson’s Seasons, his Castle of Indolence, and his Liberty, in five parts; Churchill’s Rosciad; Young’s Night Thoughts, and his Universal Passion; Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination; Goldsmith’s Traveller, and his Deserted Village; Johnson’s London, and his Vanity of Human Wishes; Armstrong’s Art of Preserving Health; Cowper’s Task, his Review of Schools, his Table Talk, and his Conversation; and Beattie’s Minstrel. In addition, there are a great number of smaller pieces by these writers, and also by Ben Jonson, Cowley, Waller, Parnell, Rowe, Green, Tickell, Hammond, Swift, A. Philips, Collins, Shenstone, Gray, Smollet, Lyttleton, the Wartons, and Mason. These poems probably contain altogether considerably more than 100,000 lines; and certainly could not be purchased, in any other form in which they have ever been published, for anything like the cost of the present volume. The biographical and critical notices with which the productions of each writer are introduced, are short and unpretending; but although they cannot be described as containing anything either very profound or very brilliant, the opinions which they advance are for the most part inoffensive and sensible enough, and at least as records of dates, compiled from common sources, but we believe tolerably accurate, they will be found useful.
There is another edition of this book, divided into several volumes, and sold at a considerably higher price; but that in one volume, which we have described, is the edition both for the single student and also for the economically conducted subscription library. In this shape too it is a capital book for the traveller’s trunk or portmanteau--a whole library of delightful reading, which hardly occupies the room of a single change of linen. The publishers, we ought likewise to mention, have lately brought out another volume to match with the present, containing many of the principal works (the whole of the Faery Queene among others) of our earlier poets. This is also an extremely beautiful book, but, from being larger than its predecessor, it is considerably dearer. The critical notices have the advantage of being from the pen of Mr. Southey.
There is no department in which English literature is richer than in that of poetry, nor is the literature of any country richer in this department than that of England. For nearly five hundred years, that is to say from the middle of the fourteenth century, when Chaucer flourished, to the middle of the nineteenth in which we ourselves live, our language has been constantly accumulating wealth of this description. Of all the works of former times, the writings of our old poets are beyond all comparison those which are still the best known, and may be most truly said yet to live. A great poem is indeed the only sort of literary production that ever gains a real immortality. Among prose works, one supplants another as successive generations come into being; and the older are little more than remembered in name, almost without being ever read. Certainly, they lose altogether their popular acceptance. The reason of this is to be found, without looking for it in any superior excellence, or preeminent natural attraction, which poetry may possess. A great poem is the only sort of work which can be said to be really finished and perfect--to be something which any addition would injure. All other works are written for the time merely till others on the same subject shall be composed, with the aid of better lights, to take their places; poems only are written for all ages. Milton knew this well, when, resolving, as he has himself recorded, to produce a work which men should not willingly let die, he addressed himself to the composition of a great poem. The only other species of work that can compete in this respect with a great poem is a work of pure science. The same quality of perfection (not absolute excellence, but absolute _finish_), which belongs to the former, may belong also to the latter, _in so far as it goes_. Thus, the Iliad of Homer has descended to us, a popular book, from the remotest times, and, along with it, the Elements of Euclid.
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THE DEATH OF RICHARD II. KING OF ENGLAND.
The popular errors and misstatements that exist in history are innumerable. The writers of the early annals of England, as those of other countries, have generally had a strong feeling for the marvellous, and where different versions of an event obtained, have chosen rather that which was most striking and dramatic, than that which was most true, or best supported by contemporary evidence. Later historians have but too often adopted their stories without doubt or examination.
One of such narratives is that of the death of King Richard II., which represents that unfortunate but vicious monarch as being murdered in Pomfret Castle by Sir Piers of Exton and his assistants, but not till he had made a most heroic resistance, snatching a battle-axe from one of his assailants, and with it laying no less than four of them dead at his feet.
This was the account inserted in all our current histories, and learnt by every school-boy in Goldsmith’s Abridgement: but within these few years the ingenious Mr. Tytler, in his History of Scotland, has inserted a very different one, and maintains,--“that Richard contrived to effect his escape from Pomfret Castle; that he travelled in disguise to the Scottish Isles; and that he was there discovered, in the kitchen of Donald, the Lord of the Isles, by a jester, who had been bred up at his court;--that Donald, Lord of the Isles, sent him, under the charge of the Lord Montgomery, to Robert III., King of Scotland, by whom he was supported as became his rank, so long as that monarch lived;--that he was; after the death of the king, delivered to the Duke of Albany, the governor of the kingdom, by whom he was honourably treated;--and that he finally died in the castle of Stirling, in the year 1419, and was buried on the north side of the altar, in the church of the preaching friars, in the town of that name.”
Now this story, which has been adopted by Sir Walter Scott in his epitome of Scottish History, and which is as romantic as our popular version, seems to be, like it, decidedly incorrect. All contemporary historians of the death of Richard II. give a totally different account from either of the preceding. “Of these, Thomas of Walsingham, Thomas Otterbourne, the Monk of Evesham, who wrote the life of Richard, and the continuator of the Chronicle of Croyland, all relate that Richard _voluntarily starved himself to death, in a fit of despair, in his prison at Pomfret_. To these must also be added the testimony of Gower the poet to the same effect, who was not only a contemporary, but had been himself patronised by Richard.”
The last sentence is extracted from an interesting paper lately read by Lord Dover before the Royal Society of Literature. By comparing the different authorities Lord Dover has clearly proved the incorrectness of the two stories; and though evidence is wanting to substantiate the fact, that Richard was _not “for-hungered_,” or starved to death by his keepers, “the probabilities of the case would appear to be very strongly in favour of his voluntary starvation.”
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_Courts of Justice among Crows._--Those extraordinary assemblies, which may be called crow-courts, are observed here (in the Feroe Islands) as well as in the Scotch Isles; they collect in great numbers as if they had been all summoned for the occasion. A few of the flock sit with drooping heads; others seem as grave as if they were judges, and some are exceedingly active and noisy, like lawyers and witnesses; in the course of about an hour the company generally disperse, and it is not uncommon, after they have flown away, to find one or two left dead on the spot.--_Landt’s Description of Feroe Islands._
Dr. Edmonstone, in his view of the Shetland Islands, says that sometimes the crow-court, or meeting, does not appear to be complete before the expiration of a day or two, crows coming from all quarters to the session. As soon as they are all arrived, a very general noise ensues, the business of the court is opened, and shortly after, they all fall upon one or two individual crows (who are supposed to have been condemned by their peers) and put them to death. When the execution is over, they quietly disperse.
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A Persian philosopher, being asked by what method he had acquired so much knowledge, answered, “By not being prevented by shame from asking questions when I was ignorant.”
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THE BANIAN TREE.
[Illustration: A Banyan tree, with multiple stems, forms a small grove; in the background are elaborate pagodas.]