IS MAN A MERE ANIMAL? THIS is a question which, notwithstanding a look round that glorious world, that mighty verbal expression of belief to the contrary, must universe which he has made; and, when they do arise in the minds, not of the unlearned only, | so, let them say where the point is in it, in which but of the learned; and though the answer of wisdom superior to the wisdom of man is not every person, who has learned after the right displayed. The planet in its orbit; the seasons manner, must consist of the simple and single in their revolution; the plants in their growth; word "No," yet there are certain expressions every metal and every mineral in its crystal: made use of by persons of learning, and in the how wise the earth is, that never wanders from its judgment of charity, of piety, which have virtu- path! With what forethought does the spring ally all the power of a "YES." With those who come at its appointed season! With what descant upon the wonders of creation, and in matchless arithmetic does the crocus work out proper hands, no descant is more delightful; the day upon which it shall open its golden cup! there is nothing so common as to hear of the And with what perfection of geometry does every wonderful sagacity-the marvellous forethought mineral form its crystal, without deviating from and purpose with which animals do this or do its normal type the millionth part of a degree in that. The bee, in the construction of her cells, a single angle! Where is the cube so perfect as is a profound mathematician, and has found out in sulphate of lead? And what oblique prism is that, of all forms, hexagons are the ones which so contact to its angle as carbonate of lime? can be applied to each other with the greatest These things cannot be denied; and, therefore, capacity in the individual cell, and the most if they construct by reason, the reason of man is complete occupation of all the space over which chaff compared with the dullest of metals, or the the cells extend. Then the manner in which most common of minerals! the planes at the bottom close the cells, and make each cell support another with the strength of an arch, is the most consummate application of the principles of statics. No human ingenuity could by possibility come up to this perfect science of the bee; and, as the cells answer a purpose, these wise ones say, that the bee has this purpose steadily in view when she constructs the cells. So, also, as every parent insect is charged with the continuation of her race, before her own body is given to the dust, deposits her eggs in that plant, that animal, or that other substance, which is best fitted for giving nourishment to the animal, she does it all of forethought, purpose, and with far more certainty in the execution, than man can do by the exercise of all his boasted reason. The sagacity of the dog, of the elephant, and of countless other animals, is referred to the same class of faculty, and the beasts get credit for being most profound thinkers. We shall not swell the catalogue, neither shall we particularize any of those very wonderful operations performed by animals; and we have alluded to the subject solely for the purpose of laying the axe to the root of a most mischievous error, from the trammels of which it appears that men of learning and piety are not always able to disenthral themselves. We bid them calmly and solemnly to reflect of whose work they are speaking, when they attribute this reasoning and sagacity to those animals, and, by so doing, offer up the immortal spirit of man as a sacrifice upon the altar of foul idolatry. Did not the Almighty create the world? Did he not see the end of all things from the beginning? Did he not set the signal of his wisdom and his power equally upon what we call the mighty and the mean? Let them But shall we thus peril the glories of our own immortality? Because God is all-wise and all wonderful, shall we be fools? May he in his mercy forbid, and guide us to a more rational use of that delightful faculty of speech with which he has endowed us. If we grant reason and understanding to the bee, or any other insect to the dog, or any other animal-how dare we deny it to a flower, a leaf, a crystal of stone, or even to water, which not only finds its own level, but teaches man how to find the level whenever such a finding is necessary? These creatures never err: they are all the same, "yesterday, to-day, and for ever;" and they know no more variation from their regular form, and the customary time of their development, than the planets in their orbits do from their courses. But man errs; and, in most instances, for once that he is right, he is twice wrong. Why is this? Why should it be that among all the parts of so delightful a creation, there should be a single blunderer, and, he in other respects, the most highly gifted of the whole? We answer, and the spirit of the revealed word of God answers along with us,-that the doings of man are the only part of creation in which plans are to be formed, and carried into effect by an intelligent principle, which is limited in its powers; and man fails, because God has delegated to him that which has been delegated to no other creature. It is thus that the very frailty of man stands up a witness of an immortal spirit within him; for while all the rest of nature is fixed, and confirmed by the laws of nature, man is the only creature that can err. We shall return to this delightful subject. PREDICTIONS FOR 1837. January.—If any persons expected an eclipse this month, they will be disappointed. The eyes of the nation will be drawn to London. Events will take place this month which have never transpired before, and never will again. Sore throats, railroad meetings, and newspaper squabbles, now about. Towards the latter end of the month his Majesty will lose his speech, and find another full of promise, but not at all to the purpose. February. The Church newly rated. On the 30th, the Establishment will be pronounced out of danger; tithes will be popular; and Ireland happy. March. The post-office balloon encounters a dreadful gale on its way to France, in consequence of which the mails are lost in the Channel. April 1st.—A person nearly related to, and much beloved by the reader, will narrowly escape winning and wearing a cap and bells. May. Numerous benevolent and religious meetings in the metropolis, at which many persons will be suddenly seized with fits, attended with spasmodic contraction of the hands, and extreme coldness in the region of the heart. June. Both Houses of the Legislature filled with smoke; but the nation need not be alarmed, for should there be a fire, it will be, as before, not until the session has closed. July. I clearly foresee that every soul found skating during the dog-days will be inevitably lost. August.-The "collective wisdom," assembled in February for the despatch of business, will now be prorogued for the despatch of partridges. September. Many gun accidents to precocious young gentlemen. The north-west passage still undiscovered. October.-Towards the close of this month days and nights nearly equal, especially in London, if foggy. November 8th.-Many turtles may be seen, near the Mansion-house, on their backs. 10th.Many aldermen, ditto. December. A great many fires, especially in large mansions. The glass down to 24; Ward's Miscellany up to 100,000. FICTION. ARTICLE THE FIRST. THERE is, perhaps, no realm within the domi- | morality and decorum they professed to practise, nion of literature which presents to the studious inquirer a more extensive and varied range of rich thoughts and romantic imaginations, a more widely-spread and almost boundless reach of fairy greensward, whereon fancy may revel, than among the regions of fiction. Its birth-place has been recorded, by the best writers, to have been among the scenery, groves, and golden palace roofs of the East, in those lands "where the nature of the climate, and the luxury of the inhabitants, conspired to promote its cultivation." The riches of luxury, splendour and magnificence, were there ever around it; and from these beauteous handmaids it received its fresh supplies of romance and song, from everspringing founts, whose birth-place was among the silent hills and shadowy groves, in the beautiful lands of imagination and poetry. Surrounded by such bevied beauties, we shall not be surprised to find that love, and the affections of the heart and soul, were among its earliest and most delightful associations;—that the luxury and the charm of the passions threw the rich and fervid glow of their spirituality over the story and the fiction, couching them all in language of the softest and sweetest romance. But in the olden days of the antique and oracular wisdom, there were some (and these were not few in number) in whom the mirthful jest and the honeyed laughter gave a lighter shade to the than were visible in the thoughtful expression of the more severe and rigid philosopher of the schools. From the sunny lands of eastern Persia, the wonder-working spells of imagination and fiction travelled, to sojourn for a while under the pure and more classic skies of Greece; and if the venerable practices and solemn philosophy of the learned and the wise of that land repudiated, at first, the advances of one whose careless and winning guise they would not suffer to pollute the inner penetralia of their paternal privacy; there were yet not wanting spirits who gladly welcomed the winning smile and joyous laughter of fancy to their homes, and sent her thence, in laughing triumph and jocular revelry, through the hills and valleys of the golden Grecian land. But here the humanity of man's wisdom was not the only soil over which fiction travelled. Æsop, that funny fellow, whose strokes of genuine humour and joyous jesting are connected with the lesser cares and merry smile of youth, gave both tongue, and speech, and reason to the brute creation, and did thus obtain, and will ever continue to uphold, a wider and more generous sphere of popularity, by his laughter-moving apologues, than the merriest jester who has ever succeeded him. Lucian invests him with the office of merry jester in the islands of the blessed; and Philocleon, when narrating the arts by which the Athenian suitors sought to unwrinkle the brows of the popular judges, placed the pranks of this funny reveller in the foremost rank. Esop has been a time-honoured jester, in all ages. But we must pass on, with a swift flight, over the various phases which fiction assumed in the later days of the Grecian poetry, drama, and pastoral romance, and hasten from the revelries and absurdities of early pagan fiction, to the period when, during the middle ages, it put on a richer and more gorgeous guise of enchantment. With the change in the character, manners, and customs of the nations with whom fiction had now become a household dweller, so did a more potent and prodigious alteration take place in that literature which had hitherto served for the popular vehicle of fictitious narrative. The various characters and adventures through which it passed, the embellishments and adornments in which it was dressed up, were altogether of a nature calculated to confound, astonish, and surprise. Some of these were giants, dragons, evil spirits, and dwarfs, and that “a local habitation," mystic and wonderful as the dwellers themselves, should be provided for them, the chances and changes of their wondrous existences were always to find a safe resting-place and abode within the walls of an enchanted castle. Fiction now assumed a new character, and was joined in brotherhood to romance; and numerous have been the theories and speculations indulged in to account for the origin of romantic fiction in Europe. Of these the most probable, and involving the nearest approach to truth, is that which somewhat justly ascribes it to the northern Scalds and the Arabians; and on this subject a judicious compiler thus remarks: "Without incurring the charge of credulity, it may readily be believed, that although the earliest fabrics of romantic fiction were raised by a Norman architect, with the product of his northern quarries, yet the form of many a pendent keystone, reticulated moulding, and indented battlement, may really have been influenced by the recollection of the presencechamber of the Soldan, the mosque of Cordova, or the Alcazar of Segovia." But if the tinge and barbaric richness of romance and fiction had originally shed over it the heavy splendour and gloom of the gothic ages, yet the delicate enchantments of the eastern land of its birth, were still to be seen shining out, like the delicate lights of the northern aurora, amid the gloom and shadow of the darkness of the surrounding night. The eastern peri became the fairy of Europe, and the griffin, or hippogriff, of the Italian writers was but the famous Simurgh of the Persians. In the same manner, though retrograding somewhat, may we trace "the palaces glittering with gold and diamonds" of the "Arabian Nights," to the rich and pagan splendour which throw such a charm over the pages of Ovid. Southey takes a different and a more extended view of the subject when he says, that "the machinery of the early romance writers is probably rather of classical than oriental origin. Classical superstition lingered long after the triumph of Christianity. Enchanted weapons may be traced to the workshop of Vulcan, as easily as to the deserts of Scandinavia. The tales of dragons may be originally oriental; but the adventures of Jason and Hercules were popular tales in Europe, long before the supposed migration of Odin, or the birth of Mohammed. If magical rings were invented in Asia, it was Herodotus who introduced the fashion into Europe. The fairies and ladies of the lake bear a closer resemblance to the nymphs and naiads of Rome and Greece than to the peris of the East." In support of this dictum, laid down by so great an authority, it has been urged, that the " very peculiar style of embellishment" to which the term "romantic fiction" may be most appropriately applied, owes no inconsiderable portion of its apparent peculiarity to causes which, whether they be regarded as beauties or deformities, will be found to be very near the surface. It is but the formal outline, and the variation of the costume, which prevents our noticing how very closely the forms of "the barbarous ages" are copied from the purer models of Greece and Rome. Place the altar-tomb by the sarcophagus; in the former the hands are uplifted, in the attitude of prayer, instead of grasping the sacrificial patera. The dog, the emblem of fidelity, is removed from the sides of the monument, and placed beneath the feet of her whose virtues it commemorates. The acanthus has only enveloped each pillar with a wilder grace. The genius, holding his extinguished torch, has given way to the sainted martyr, who bears the instrument of torture which tried his constancy, or the palm which denotes his victory over human nature. And the butterfly, the mystic type of death and immortality, has disappeared before a more holy symbol. But it is soon seen that it differs much less from its graceful prototype than it appeared to do when first contemplated in the "dim religious light" of the sepulchral chapel. In the same manner it may be stated, that however widely these extraordinary fables of romance differ from the classical tales of antiquity, it is certain that the dissimilarity is much enhanced by considering them apart. Whatever objections may occur to some of these details, or whatever room there may now exist for the formation of any new hypothesis concerning the system adopted by Wharton and others, in their researches on this most interesting subject, the ground-work which they laid down remains unmoved, and its verity and stability unquestioned that system which, making Persia the common and primitive source of romantic fable, deduces its progress through two distinct and widely-distant channels, to the same ultimate end and bourne; receiving, in its double course, the various impressions, on the one hand, of But, during the period of the middle ages, the province of fiction became that of especially eulogizing the virtues, fame, and renown of chivalry; and we might well fill many numbers of our Miscellany by narrating the various deeds of romance and fiction in those days of knightly arms. One of the most noted volumes of that age was the "Lyfe of Virgilius;" it holds a very conspicuous place in the literature of the middle ages, and is wholly composed of the traditionary fables which were once current respecting the bard of Mantua. It is related, in that day, that St. Louis fixed an import duty upon monkeys, at the Chatelet de Paris. The monkey of a traveller, who had bought him for his own disport, came in duty free, the monkey of a merchant, who had bought him to sell again, paid four deniers; but the monkey of a minstrel was bound to dance before the custom-house officer, who was directed to accept this display of the talents of the long-tailed figurante in discharge, not only of the monkey-duty, but of the duties to which the articles intended for jacko's use would other wise have been liable. The merry-making couple were long welcomed in hall and bower; until, in process of time, a great change took place in manners, the monkey continued a favourite, but the doors were closed against the minstrel. But if we go on with the rapid tide of history, we shall find that, during the life-time of Francis the First, and the dominion of the profligate court of Catherine of Medicis, sensuality, fanaticism, and faction, united in unsettling the mind of man, and rendering it unfit for the cultivation of genuine literature. During this period, however, some poetry was produced, for poetry must have vent; but those writers who hoped to be read, were almost wholly employed in productions calculated to fan the flames of libertinism or discord. The earliest records of that poetry which now began to appear in France and England, were metrical romances. In Italy, verse received its structure and genius from the Provençals; and love and devotion were the only themes of the sonnet, and the other lyrical productions cultivated by the fathers of Italian verse. Until Boccacio invented the ottava rima, narrative poetry cannot be said to have existed in Italy. | But, about this same period, the Spanish novelists also began to appear, and soon enjoyed a degree of popularity, at home and abroad, fully equal to that enjoyed by the Italian writers of the same We are told that, in those days, before the work of a Spanish author could see the light, it was obliged to be passed through a tremendous defile of bishops and inquisitors, lords of the council, secretaries of state, and notaries royal and apostolical, whose licenses and approbations generally filled half a sheet at the beginning of each volume. This wretched system produced one solitary benefit, to compensate for its manifold evils, it completely checked the corruption which disgraced the pages of the French and the Italian writers of that period. The Spaniards might, therefore, boast that their language was not profaned by becoming the vehicle of impurity. Another distinguishing feature of the Spanish novella was its length; it was generally a very extended and complicated narrative. The Italian novella was often confined to a simple joke or apophthegm, or to a single adventure. Of the early German literature, much valuable information has been collected by the labours of Göius, Hagen, Büsching, and many other writers, who have applied themselves with the greatest ardour, energy, and judgment to the investigation of the ancient literature of their country. The romance of their chivalrous deeds remained in fashion until the commencement of the thirty years' war; the long continuation of which subverted, after a time, the ancient habits of the people. They then began to imitate the spirit of the olden romances, which retained their popularity among them during the early part of the seventeenth century. From that period up to the times of the present day, the Germans have continned to attach a vast degree of importance to the novel and romance; and this species of composition forms a most important and extensive division in their literary history, it having been illustrated and cultivated by almost every author among them of real or fancied eminence in the world of letters. If we dwell awhile upon the consideration of the personages and incidents which are developed in the mazes of an epic poem or a chivalrous romance, we shall soon discover that the effect of their perusal is to conduct us into a mystic world of enchanted wonder, inhabited by powerful and supernatural agencies, as well as by beings inheriting a portion of the human character and wisdom of man. And wherever these latter beings have a preternatural and powerful energy given to them, altogether inconsistent with that under-current of human nature, which is suffered, in some degree, to make them of the earth, earthy, and regulate their character and conduct, the events and circumstances which, in the development of the romantic catastrophe, these beings are designed to unfold, are also in themselves found to be of a nature widely and distinctly different from those which regulate the common and every-day course of human affairs. We have thus taken a swift and rapid survey of the different species of fiction, their ages, histories, and general distinguishing characteristics; but ere we proceed further in the investigation of this subject, we must, in concluding this article, bestow a few remarks on a division of the subject which is endeared by the memory of early childhood, and its unalloyed and happy associations. Mean and comparatively humble as are the puny fictions of our early nursery literature, these minor efforts of the human intellect show more clearly, perhaps, than may be generally supposed, the secret. workings of a lowlier study-a younger off-shoot it may be of the universal book of nature. Sir Walter Scott has observed, most eloquently, on this subject, "that a work of great interest might be compiled upon the origin of popular fiction, and the transmission of similar tales from age to age, and from country to country. The mythology of one period would then appear to pass into the romance of the next century, and that into the nursery tale of the subsequent ages." Thus might fiction be resolved into the earlier and more primitive elements of its creation. The scenes embodied in the recesses of a vivid and dreaming imagination, in the earlier childhood of life, would become the offspring of a fond and fervent faith in future years. Sanctity thus clothes the dream before the altar of the idol. From the earlier days of the Celts, the foundations of our own popular nursery literature have been laid; and from its earliest birth poesy has nursed, watched over, and strengthened it, until it has grown with its growth, and strengthened with its strength, to the full period of its mature manhood. The popular nursery fictions of our own country may claim, with those of the continent, one common kindred of birthright; and as the people of England and of the Scottish lowlands are, undoubtedly, offsets and grafts from the Teutonic stock, it may, therefore, be considered as highly probable that our popular fables are also chiefly of Teutonic origin. Indeed, these idle imaginations and stories of our childhood may boast of a more distant origin, in the annals of the olden time, than those romances and poems which boast of, and clothe themselves in, the bravery of greater and more wonderful pretensions. EPHON. |