Part 2
Tobacco was introduced into Europe from the province of Tabaca in St. Domingo in 1559, by a Spanish gentleman, named Hernandez de Toledo, who brought a small quantity into Spain and Portugal. From thence, by the means of the French ambassador at Lisbon, Jean Nicot from whom it derived its name of Nicotia, it found its way to Paris, where it was used in the form of a powder by Catherine de Medici. Tobacco then came under the patronage of the Cardinal Santa Croce, the pope’s nuncio, who, returning from his embassy at the Spanish and Portuguese courts, carried the plant to his own country, and thus acquired a fame little inferior to that which, at another period, he had won by piously bringing a portion of the _real_ cross from the Holy Land. Both in France and in the Papal States it was at once received with general enthusiasm, in the shape of snuff; but it was some time after the use of tobacco as snuff that the practice of smoking it commenced. This practice is generally supposed to have been introduced into England by Sir Walter Raleigh; but Camden says, in his ‘Elizabeth,’ that Sir Francis Drake and his companions, on their return from Virginia in 1585, were “the first, as far as he knew, who introduced the Indian plant, called Tabacca or Nicotia, into England, having been taught by the Indians to use it as a remedy against indigestion. And from the time of their return,” says he, “it immediately began to grow into very general use, and to bear a high price; a great many persons, some from luxury, and others for their health, being wont to draw in the strong-smelling smoke with insatiable greediness through an earthenware tube, and then to puff it forth again through their nostrils: so that tabacca-taverns (tabernæ tabaccanæ) are now as generally kept in all our towns, as wine-houses or beerhouses.” No doubt the tobacco-taverns of Queen Elizabeth’s times were not unworthy predecessors of the splendid cygar divans of the present day. It appears from a note in the ‘Criminal Trials,’ vol i. p. 361, that in 1600 the French ambassador, in his despatches, represented the Peers, on the trial of the Earls of Essex and Southampton, as smoking tobacco copiously while they deliberated on their verdict. Sir Walter Raleigh, too, was accused of having sat with his pipe at the window of the armoury, while he looked in at the execution of Essex in the Tower. Both these stories are probably untrue, but the mere relation of them by contemporaneous writers shows that they were not then monstrously incredible, and they therefore prove the generality of the practice of smoking at that time amongst the higher class of society. After a time, however, the practice of smoking tobacco appears to have met with strenuous opposition in high places, both in this country and other parts of Europe. Its principal opponents were the priests, the physicians, and the sovereign princes; by the former its use was declared sinful; and, in 1684, Pope Urban VIII. published a bull, excommunicating all persons found guilty of taking snuff when in church. This bull was renewed in 1690, by Pope Innocent; and, about twenty-nine years afterwards, the Sultan Amurath IV made smoking a capital offence. For a long time smoking was forbidden in Russia, under pain of having the nose cut off; and in some parts of Switzerland, it was likewise made a subject of public prosecution--the police regulations of the canton of Berne, in 1661, placing the prohibition of smoking in the list of the Ten Commandments, immediately under that against adultery. Nay, that British Solomon, James I., did not think it beneath the royal dignity to take up his pen upon the subject. He accordingly, in 1603, published his famous ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco,’ in which the following remarkable passage occurs:--“It is a custom loathesome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.” But notwithstanding this regal and priestly wrath, the use of the plant extended itself far and wide; and tobacco is, at this moment, perhaps the most general luxury in existence. The allusion to the practice in the following lines, taken from the ‘Marrow of Compliment,’ written in 1651, seems to show the prevalence of smoking at that period:--
“Much meat doth Gluttony procure To feed men fat as swine; But he’s a frugal man indeed, That on a _leaf_ can dine! He needs no napkin for his hands, His fingers’ ends to wipe, That hath his kitchen in a box, His roast meat in a Pipe!”
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THE WEEK.
[Illustration: Petrarch.]
July 15.--_Saint Swithin._--Swithin, or Swithum, was a bishop of Winchester who died in 868. He was, if the tradition connected with his memory is to be believed, a man of sense; for he was above observing one of the vain distinctions which exist even in our own day. He desired that he might be buried in the open church-yard, instead of the chancel of the minster, where the great reposed; and Bishop Hall adds, that he wished his body to be laid “where the drops of rain might wet his grave; thinking that no vault was so good to cover his grave as that of heaven.” This was a wise and a Christian wish; for assuredly the desire that the worthless body shall be entombed beneath the sacred aisles where the living come to elevate their thoughts with the hopes of immortality, is a poor clinging of the soul to the perishable garment with which it is clothed. The wish of Swithin that his ashes should speedily mingle with the elements, and that the rains of heaven should water his grave, showed a humble and a truly religious mind. His monks, says the tradition, thought more highly of worldly distinctions; and therefore, upon the good bishop being canonized, resolved to remove his body from the common cemetery into the choir of their church. This was to have been done on the 15th of July; but it rained so violently for forty days that the design was abandoned. Mr. Howard, in his interesting work on the Climate of London, says, “The tradition is so far valuable as it proves that the summers in this southern part of our island were subject a thousand years ago to occasional heavy rains, in the same way as at present.” The popular superstition connected with St. Swithin’s day is expressed in a Scotch proverb:--
“Saint Swithin’s day, gif ye do rain, For forty days it will remain; Saint Swithin’s day, an ye be fair, For forty daies ’twill rain nae mair.”
Mr. Howard has taken some pains to ascertain how far the popular notion is borne out by the fact. In 1807, according to him, it rained with us on the day in question, and a dry time followed; and the same in 1808. In 1818 and 1819 it was dry on the 15th, and a very dry time in each case followed. The other summers, occurring between 1807 and 1819, appear to have come under the general proposition, “that in a majority of our summers, a showery period, which, with some latitude as to time and local circumstances, may be admitted to constitute daily rain for forty days, does come on about the time indicated by the tradition of St. Swithin.”
July 20.--The birth-day of FRANCIS PETRARCH, one of the three renowned fathers of the literature of modern Italy. He was born in 1304, at Arezzo, in the Florentine territory, the same district which had the glory of giving birth to his immediate predecessor Dante, and also to the other member of the illustrious trio, his contemporary and friend Boccaccio. Petrarch’s father had been a notary in the city of Florence, but had, like Dante, been banished some time before the birth of his son in consequence of one of the political convulsions then so frequent. Being intended by his father for his own profession, he was sent to study first at Montpellier and afterwards at Bologna; but he soon became deeply smitten with the charms of the newly-revived literature of antiquity, Virgil and Cicero stealing most of the hours which were professedly devoted to more rugged pages. His father is related to have been so much displeased on discovering how his son employed his time, that he took his favourite authors from him and threw them into the fire. This severity, however, failed to make a lawyer of Petrarch. His father died when he was about two and twenty, and he immediately abandoned the law altogether. He then chose the church for his profession; but he never was ordained, although in the latter part of his life some valuable clerical preferments were bestowed upon him by the patrons whom he had gained by his poetical fame. The remainder of Petrarch’s life took much of its colour from an incident which happened to him in his twenty-seventh year, his meeting at Avignon, in Provence, with the celebrated Laura, whose name he has rendered in so many beautiful verses as immortal as his own. After the researches of a long succession of biographers and critics, all is still uncertainty as to who or what this lady really was. Many have even believed that Petrarch spent his life in pouring out his passionate rhymes to a mere ideal being, or vision of his imagination. The same obscurity hangs over the very existence of Laura as over that of Dante’s Beatrice. Several succeeding years were spent by the poet in wandering through Italy and other countries. He then retired to Vaucluse, a solitary retreat not far from Avignon, and it was during several studious years which he spent there that he composed his principal works. The most memorable event of his life after this was his coronation, in 1340, as poet-laureat in the Capitol of Rome. “Twelve patrician youths,” says Gibbon, “were arrayed in scarlet; six representatives of the most illustrious families, in green robes, with garlands of flowers, accompanied the procession; in the midst of the princes and nobles, the senator, Count of Anguillara, a kinsman of the Colonna, ascended the throne; and at the voice of a herald, Petrarch arose. After discoursing on a text of Virgil, and thrice repeating his vows for the prosperity of Rome, he knelt before the throne, and received from the senator a laurel crown, with a more precious declaration, ‘This is the reward of merit.’ The people shouted, ‘Long life to the Capitol and the Poet!’ A sonnet in praise of Rome was accepted as the effusion of genius and gratitude; and after the whole procession had visited the Vatican, the profane wreath was suspended before the shrine of St. Peter. In the diploma which was presented to Petrarch, the title and prerogatives of poet-laureat are revived in the Capitol, after the lapse of thirteen hundred years; and he receives the perpetual privilege of wearing, at his choice, a crown of laurel, ivy or myrtle, of assuming the poetic habit, and of teaching, disputing, interpreting, and composing, in all places whatsoever, and on all subjects of literature. The grant was ratified by the authority of the Senate and people, and the character of citizen was the recompense of his affection for the Roman name.” After these honours he made other journeys to different parts of Italy, and also to Paris, in 1360, where he was received with great distinction. An archdeaconry in the church of Parma, a priory in the diocese of Pisa, and a canonry at Padua, were also bestowed upon him, as more substantial rewards of his merit and attestations of the public admiration. Our own Chaucer is supposed to have met with Petrarch either in 1368, at the marriage of Lionel Duke of Clarence with the daughter of the Duke of Milan, or more probably in the beginning of the year 1373, when he is supposed to have gone on an embassy to Genoa. At this interview Petrarch is thought to have communicated to the English poet the beautiful and pathetic tale of Griselda, which he had recently received from his friend Boccaccio, and had translated from the latter’s Italian into Latin. This translation, which Warton, in his History of English Poetry, inadvertently affirms never to have been printed, may be found in several of the old folio editions of Petrarch’s works. Petrarch, in a letter to Boccaccio, tells us, says Warton; “that on showing the translation to one of his Paduan friends, the latter, touched with the tenderness of the story, burst into such frequent and violent fits of tears, that he could not read to the end.”
Petrarch spent the last four years of his life at the beautiful mountain village of Arquà, about twelve miles from Padua; and here he died suddenly, in all probability of apoplexy, on the 19th of July, 1374, having just completed his seventieth year. He was found that morning in his library, with his head resting on a book. Here, too, his remains were deposited and are still preserved. Many of our readers will remember Lord Byron’s fine lines on this subject:--
“There is a tomb in Arquà;--reared in air, Pillared in their sarcophagus, repose The bones of Laura’s lover: here repair Many familiar with his well-sung woes, The pilgrims of his genius. He arose To raise a language, and his land reclaim From the dull yoke of her barbaric foes: Watering the tree which bears his lady’s name With his melodious tears, he gave himself to fame.
“They keep his dust in Arquà, where he died; The mountain-village, where his latter days Went down the vale of years; and ’tis their pride-- An honest pride--and let it be their praise, To offer to the passing stranger’s gaze His mansion and his sepulchre; both plain And venerably simple, such as raise A feeling more accordant with his strain Than if a pyramid formed his monumental fame.
“And the soft quiet hamlet where he dwelt Is one of that complexion which seems made For those who their mortality have felt, And sought a refuge from their hopes decayed In the deep umbrage of a green hill’s shade, Which shows a distant prospect far away Of busy cities, now in vain displayed, For they can lure no further; and the ray Of a bright sun can make sufficient holiday.”
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THE ADVANTAGES OF A TASTE FOR THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE.
[From Dr. Percival’s Moral and Literary Dissertations.]
That sensibility to beauty, which, when cultivated and improved, we term taste, is universally diffused through the human species; and it is most uniform with respect to those objects, which, being out of our power, are not liable to variation, from accident, caprice, or fashion. The verdant lawn, the shady grove, the variegated landscape, the boundless ocean, and the starry firmament, are contemplated with pleasure by every attentive beholder. But the emotions of different spectators, though similar in kind, differ widely in degree: and to relish, with full delight, the enchanting scenes of nature, the mind must be uncorrupted by avarice, sensuality, or ambition; quick in her sensibilities; elevated in her sentiments; and devout in her affections. He who possesses such exalted powers of perception and enjoyment, may almost say, with the poet--
“I care not, Fortune, what you me deny; You cannot rob me of free Nature’s grace; You cannot shut the windows of the sky, Through which Aurora shows her brightening face; You cannot bar my constant feet to trace The woods and lawns, by living streams, at eve: Let health my nerves and finer fibres brace, And I their toys to the great children leave: Of fancy, reason, virtue, nought can me bereave!”
Perhaps such ardent enthusiasm may not be compatible with the necessary toils and active offices which Providence has assigned to the generality of men. But there are none to whom some portion of it may not prove advantageous; and if it were cherished by each individual in that degree which is consistent with the indispensable duties of his station, the felicity of human life would be considerably augmented. From this source the refined and vivid pleasures of the imagination are almost entirely derived: and the elegant arts owe their choicest beauties to a taste for the contemplation of nature. Painting and sculpture are express imitations of visible objects; and where would be the charms of poetry, if divested of the imagery and embellishments which she borrows from rural scenes? Painters, statuaries, and poets, therefore, are always ambitious to acknowledge themselves the pupils of nature; and, as their skill increases, they grow more and more delighted with every view of the animal and vegetable world. But the pleasure resulting from admiration is transient; and to cultivate taste without regard to its influence on the passions and affections, “is to rear a tree for its blossoms which is capable of yielding the richest and most valuable fruit.” Physical and moral beauty bear so intimate a relation to each other, that they may be considered as different gradations in the scale of excellence; and the knowledge and relish of the former should be deemed only a step to the nobler and more permanent enjoyments of the latter.
Whoever has visited the Leasowes, in Warwickshire, must have felt the force and propriety of an inscription which meets the eye at the entrance into these delightful grounds:--
“Would you, then, taste the tranquil scene? Be sure your bosom be serene; Devoid of hate, devoid of strife, Devoid of all that poisons life: And much it ’vails you, in this place To graft the love of human race.”
Now, such scenes contribute powerfully to inspire that serenity which is necessary to enjoy and to heighten their beauties. By a sweet contagion the soul catches the harmony which she contemplates; and the frame within assimilates itself to that which is without. For
“------Who can forbear to smile with nature? Can the strong passions in the bosom roll While every gale is peace, and every grove Is melody?”
In this state of composure we become susceptible of virtuous impressions from almost every surrounding object: an equal and extensive benevolence is called forth into exertion; and having felt a common interest in the gratifications of inferior beings, we shall be no longer indifferent to their sufferings, or become wantonly instrumental in producing them.
It seems to be the intention of Providence that the lower order of animals should be subservient to the comfort, convenience, and sustenance of man. But his right of dominion extends no further; and if this right be exercised with mildness, humanity, and justice, the subjects of his power will be no less benefited than himself; for various species of living creatures are annually multiplied by human art, improved in their perceptive powers by human culture, and plentifully fed by human industry. The relation, therefore, is reciprocal between such animals and man; and he may supply his own wants by the use of their labour, the produce of their bodies, and even the sacrifice of their lives; whilst he co-operates with all-gracious Heaven in promoting happiness, the great end of existence.
But though it be true that partial evil, with respect to different orders of sensitive beings, may be universal good, and that it is a wise and benevolent institution of nature, to make destruction itself, within certain limitations, the cause of an increase of life and enjoyment; yet a generous person will extend his compassionate regards to every individual that suffers for his sake; and whilst he sighs
“Even for the kid, or lamb, that pours its life Beneath the bloody knife,”
he will naturally be solicitous to mitigate pain, both in duration and degree, by the gentlest mode of inflicting it.
I am inclined to believe, however, that this sense of humanity would soon be obliterated, and that the heart would grow callous to every soft impression, were it not for the benignant influence of the smiling face of nature. The Count do Lauzun, when imprisoned by Louis XIV. in the Castle of Pignerol, amused himself, during a long period of time, with catching flies, and delivering them to be devoured by a rapacious spider. Such an entertainment was equally singular and cruel, and inconsistent, I believe, with his former character and subsequent turn of mind. But his cell had no window, and received only a glimmering light from an aperture in the roof. In less unfavourable circumstances, may we not presume that, instead of sporting with misery, he would have released the agonized flies, and bid them enjoy that freedom of which he himself was bereaved?
But the taste for natural beauty is subservient to higher purposes than these which have been enumerated; and the cultivation of it not only refines and humanizes, but dignifies and exalts the affections. It elevates them to the admiration and love of that Being who is the Author of all that is fair, sublime, and good in the creation. Scepticism and irreligion are hardly compatible with the sensibility of heart which arises from a just and lively relish of the wisdom, harmony, and order subsisting in the world around us; and emotions of piety must spring up spontaneously in the bosom that is in unison with all animated nature. Actuated by this divine inspiration, man finds a fane in every grove; and, glowing with devout fervour, he joins his song to the universal chorus, or muses the praise of the Almighty in more expressive silence. Thus they
“Whom nature’s works can charm, with God himself Hold converse; grow familiar, day by day, With his conceptions; act upon his plan, And form to his the relish of their souls.”
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DISTRICT SOCIETY OF BRIGHTON
Among the numerous benevolent schemes and institutions formed by the wealthy to assist their poorer brethren, many may no doubt be found, which instead of being beneficial are pernicious in their effects--palsying the hand of industry, and destroying the sense of independence by mere almsgiving. All those societies, however, which give motives for industry, and which tend to create a sympathy and union between the two classes of those who have abundance and those who want, must be of moral benefit to both parties, and few can doubt their practical utility.
The following is a slight sketch of a Society which appears eminently to combine the above advantages.
About five or six years back “The District Society” was formed at Brighton, in consequence of the suggestions of that benevolent lady, Mrs. Fry. The purport of this association was, that its members should visit the poor at their own houses--affording them assistance where required, and encouraging in them habits of industry and frugality. The idea was eagerly seized by those of the inhabitants whose activity and influence were best able to promote this object, and in a very short time the society was established.
This society is divided into three departments--the mendicity department--the relief department--and the department for the encouragement of frugality and saving. It is not our intention at present to touch upon the first or second of these, but to confine ourselves solely to the latter object.